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An artist´s escape from a stultifying marriage is set against India´s fight for independence and a world war, in a sweeping new novel by the Man Booker longlisted author of Sleeping on Jupiter

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"The book everyone is talking about for the summer" Lorraine Candy, Sunday Times

A beautifully written and compelling story of how families fall apart and of what remains in the aftermath . . . [by] . . . a writer of great subtlety and intelligence. - Kamila Shamsie, Guardian.

In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman" - so begins the story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, who is driven to rebel against tradition and follow her artist´s instinct for freedom.

Freedom of a different kind is in the air across India. The fight against British rule is reaching a critical turn. The Nazis have come to power in Germany. At this point of crisis, two strangers arrive in Gayatri´s town, opening up for her the vision of other possible lives.

What took Myshkin´s mother from India to Dutch-held Bali in the 1930s, ripping a knife through his comfortingly familiar environment? Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, Myshkin comes to understand the connections between anguish at home and a war-torn universe overtaken by patriotism.

Anuradha Roy´s enthralling novel is a powerful parable for our times, telling the story of men and women trapped in a dangerous era uncannily similar to the present. Impassioned, elegiac, and gripping, it brims with the same genius that has brought Roy´s earlier fiction international renown.

"One of India´s greatest living authors" - O, The Oprah Magazine

"Roy´s writing is a joy" - Financial Times

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From Sleeping on Jupiter to this book, Roy seems to be bettering her own brilliance. Though the narration is effortless, Roy´s research and imagination in recreating a bygone era shines out. This is an excellent, unputdownable book Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar The Hindu 20180525

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Roy, Anuradha
Anuradha Roy´s novel Sleeping on Jupiter was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and won the D.S.C. prize for South Asian Literature. She won the Economist Crossword Prize, India´s premier award for fiction, for her novel The Folded Earth, which was nominated for several other prizes including the Man Asia, the D.S.C., and the Hindu Literary Award. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and The Seattle Times.

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