India, Sept. 12 -- Ranbir Sidhu's searing new work opens with the death of his father and loops back nine months, to the loss of his mother, "the gestation period for a human embryo". Wanting to understand something of their lives, he journeys from the working-class neighbourhoods of his London childhood to middle-class California and to rural Punjab. Who were his parents, he asks, and who might they have been were it not for the ugliness of Partition and the village's patriarchal grip? In an innovative blend of memoir, essay, travelogue and history, Sidhu charts the geographical space where his parents were born and died, against its deep histories of violence and its demand for a masculinity that deforms the lives of women and men. All of which is tethered to one word that makes imagination impossible: sharam, or shame. No One Gets Out of Here Alive tells the story of a family, and in doing so, tells a story of Punjab....