Making the longlist this week for the US National Book Award for translated literature, Intan Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells is a subversive, shape-shifting novel in which family tragedy becomes political reckoning, horror exposes social violence, and familiar stories turn sinister.

Set in Indonesia, the novel opens in the aftermath of a suicide bombing by a radical group targeting places of worship and community groups. Annisa, a young mother and the youngest of three sisters, is dead, leaving her sisters, Muti and Maya, to confront the question that drives the novel: what led Annisa to get on a motorbike with a bomb strapped to her chest and why did she join this radical group intent on killing innocent men, women and children?

The search for answers to these questions takes the sisters into a world where myth and history, the living and the dead, and innocence and culpability are never easily separated.

Paramaditha’s achievement lies in the way she brings Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism and contemporary political violence into conversation with the ghostly legacies of western literature. Three familiar stories are particularly important: Shakespeare’s King Lear, the fairy tale of Cinderella, and the storytelling tradition of One Thousand and One Nights. These are not simply literary references; they become frameworks through which the novel questions power, identity and the stories societies choose to believe.

A miniature political world

Family dynamics in the novel evoke King Lear, with its destructive entanglement of parental authority, patriarchy, favouritism and fractured loyalties. The father’s preference for Annisa helps shape the sisters’ unequal positions within the family, leaving Muti and Maya to negotiate the emotional consequences. As in Shakespeare’s tragedy, the household becomes a miniature political world in which love and loyalty are inseparable from power.

Yet Paramaditha refuses to treat family conflict as a private drama alone: the violence embedded in domestic relationships echoes the wider structures of exclusion and authority beyond the home.

It is Cinderella, however, that provides the novel with its most provocative challenge to conventional storytelling. Muti is named the Caretaker, Maya the Traveller and Annisa the Bride, roles that appear to promise familiar fairytale destinies. But Paramaditha shifts our attention away from the favoured heroine towards those relegated to the margins.

“Revolutions always begin with ugly stepsisters,” becomes the novel’s radical declaration. The stepsisters are no longer merely jealous obstacles to someone else’s happiness; they are figures who expose the unfair rules governing who deserves love, beauty, recognition and a happy ending. Revolution begins when those assigned lesser roles refuse to accept the story written for them.

With its title, the novel clearly echoes One Thousand and One Nights to introduce yet another dimension: storytelling itself as a means of survival and resistance. Like the narrator Scheherazade, whose tales defer death, Paramaditha’s characters inhabit a world where narratives carry power.

But who controls the story, and whose voice is silenced? This is given focus in the chapter titled “No Shahrazad’s Tale”, suggesting that the absence of a story can be as politically significant as its telling. The novel’s interwoven narratives refuse the reassurance of a single authoritative account.

Layers of strangeness

Indonesian folklore adds a further layer of strangeness. The grandmother’s stories of weretigers and shapeshifters evoke a world in which identities are fluid and appearances deceptive. This supernatural atmosphere does not simply provide horror; it unsettles the boundaries through which society distinguishes the acceptable from the monstrous.

Meanwhile, the bombings of a church, a mosque and an Islamic study group for transgender women expose the deadly consequences of ideological certainty. Religious belief, mysticism and political extremism coexist uneasily, without being reduced to a simplistic explanation of violence.

Rohadi, the servant’s son who was raised with the sisters and regarded as a sibling, reappears in the novel as Rosalinda, a transgender woman, to remember the impact of marginalisation inside and outside the family. Once expelled after being suspected of petty theft, Rosalinda embodies the cost of social rejection. Her later role leading a community group for transgender women offers a different kind of belonging, built not on inherited status but on solidarity.

The novel’s striking red cover and mask-like face is reminiscent of South Asian Kathakali dance performances. With its protruding tongue and tiny house lodged in its throat, it captures the novel’s unsettling theatricality: the domestic world swallowed by myth, and a voice struggling to escape confinement.

By the end of the novel, the sisters’ roles have shifted. Muti becomes the traveller, Maya the family caretaker, and Rosalinda builds a safe place for members of her transgender community.

Their endings resist the neat resolution of a fairy tale. In this dark, inventive novel, the ugly stepsisters do not simply demand a place in the old narrative. They begin the revolution by rewriting it.

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