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An Atlas of Impossible Longing

On sale

5th March 2009

Price: £8.99

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Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9781849165884

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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.

Reviews

Financial Times
'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.
Sunday Express
'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.
Time magazine
'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.