Historically, realism and sentiment were considered to be opposed, with the realist novel usually deemed more modern and politically inclined than its sentimental counterpart. However, this binary devalues the affective component of the public sphere, in which emotional investment is a precursor to political transformation. This chapter suggests ways to read sentiment and the sentimental novel as not antithetical to, but as complementing, realism through a reading of Mahasweta Devi’s Hajaar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084, publ. 1973) and Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002). I show how both novels offer ways of understanding social crises affectively, centering grief, love, and other emotions in the process of ethical meaning making and representing politics as having private and visceral dimensions as well as public and rational ones.