Aag Ka Darya (Urdu: آگ کا دریا; River of Fire) is a landmark historical Urdu-language novel written by Qurratulain Hyder providing context to the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two nation-states.
[1] The novel timelines spanned more than two thousand years, starting from the time of Chandargupta Maurya in the fourth century BC to the post-Independence period in India and Pakistan.
[3] Set across "four Indian epochs (the classical, the medieval, the colonial, and the modern post-national)", Hyder traces the fates of four souls through time: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril.
[7][3] Aamer Hussein in The Times Literary Supplement wrote that River of Fire is to Urdu fiction what One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Hispanic literature.
Kamil Ahsan in The Nation wrote: The magnum opus of possibly the most acclaimed Urdu novelist of all time...River of Fire tells a completist and syncretistic version of 2,500 years of history in modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—beginning with the Nanda Dynasty on the brink of defeat by the founder of the Mauryan Empire (323 to 185 BCE), and ending in post-Partition despair.