An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Published on 5. March 2009
321 pages
978-1-84916-588-4 (ISBN)
Description
On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family live in solitude in their vast new house. Here, swathed in silence, a widower struggles with feelings for an unmarried cousin while his motherless daughter Bakul runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. Confined at the top of the house, the matriarch goes slowly mad, while her husband shapes and reshapes his glorious garden.
As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. Although he prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, his thoughts are all of what was once his home - and he knows that he must return.
This is a love story, as intricate as it is enchanting, about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else.
As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. Although he prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, his thoughts are all of what was once his home - and he knows that he must return.
This is a love story, as intricate as it is enchanting, about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else.
Reviews / Votes
'A lyrical love letter to India's past - an India of innocent child brides and jasmine-scented summer evenings. Poetic and evocative. Roy's writing is a joy' Financial Times. * Financial Times * 'A story to lose yourself in ... Anuradha Roy is a wonderful writer ... this tale of three generations of an Indian family, set over the span of the 20th century, is brilliantly told' Sunday Express. * Sunday Express * 'Written with a soaring yet impeccably balanced lyricism, Roy's prose does not hit a single wrong note: its restrained beauty sings off the page. Above all, the book has an elusive quality, so absent from the contemporary novel, a quality that can only be described as grace' Time magazine. * Time magazine *More details
Edition
Digital original
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Quercus Publishing
Edition type
Digital original
File size
2,92 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-84916-588-4 (9781849165884)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Anuradha Roy
An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Book
03/2009
MacLehose Press
€14.00
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Person
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.
