Novelist, journalist and editor Anuradha Roy’s newest book All The Lives We Never Lived will be published in June 2018, according to her Indian publisher, Hachette India.
Spanning twentieth century India, the novel tells the story of Myshkin and his mother Gayatri, an artist who abandons her family in a pursuit for freedom. Freedom of another kind is in the air across all of India, and in Germany the Nazis have come to power. At this point of crisis, a German artist from Gayatri’s past seeks her out. His arrival ignites passions she has long been forced to suppress. The novel travels through time from the Independence movement till the 1990s, the personal strife and turmoil of the characters set against a larger backdrop of a world torn apart by nationalism.
“This is a beautifully crafted novel that embodies the restraint that is quintessentiallyAnuradha – in its evocation of loss, pain and love,” said Poulomi Chatterjee, Editor-in-Chief of Hachette India.
If it seems like an ambitious undertaking, Roy’s past novels are a reassuring testament to the author’s skill. Her previous book, Sleeping on Jupiter, published in 2015, masterfully merged personal with political while being immensely readable and won the 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and also made it to the 2015 Man Booker Prize longlist. Her previous two novels, The Folded Earth and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, were critically-acclaimed and have been widely translated.
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