About this item
From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present-day about a son's quest to uncover the truth about his mother. In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman. The man was in fact German, but in smalltown India in those days, all white foreigners were largely thought of as British. So begins the story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, a rebellious, alluring artist who abandons parenthood and marriage to follow her primal desire for freedom. Though freedom may be stirring in the air of India, across the world the Nazis have risen to power in Germany. 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. What follows is her life as pieced together by her son, a journey that takes him through India and Dutchheld Bali. Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, he comes to understand his longlost mother, and the connections between strife at home and a wartorn universe overtaken by patriotism. With her signature "precise and poetic" (The Independent) writing, Anuradha Roy's All the Lives We Never Lived is a spellbinding and emotionally powerful saga about family, identity, and love.
About the Author
Anuradha Roy's journalism and book reviews have been published in Outlook, India Today, Outlook Traveller, National Geographic Traveller, Biblio, Telegraph, Indian Express, and the Hindu. She works as a designer at Permanent Black, an independent press which she runs with her husband, Rukun Advani. She lives in India.
