anuradha roy

In 2016, I went to Sri Lanka for the first time, for the Galle Book Festival, and was interviewed for one of the panels by Ameena Hussein. She was dazzling -- widely read, perceptive, quick-thinking, free-wheeling. It was one of the best experiences I've ever had of being in a literary event. Through the course of the festival, and during one of their trips to India, I had the chance to get to know Ameena and her partner Sam Perera better. Much as Rukun Advani and I run Permanent Black, they run an independent publishing house, Perera-Hussein . Besides this, Ameena is a writer, author of The Moon in the Water (long listed for the Man Asia Prize) and two award-winning short story collections. Perera-Hussein was established in December 2003, and has a list that includes writers such as Gananath Obeysekere, Nayomi Munaweera, and Nayanjot Lahiri. And this month, Perera-Hussein published All the Lives We Never Lived in Sri Lanka. It is out now in paperback, priced 1250 Sri Lank...

Is Anuradha Roy India’s greatest living novelist? Beautifully out of sync: All the Lives We Never Lives reviewed in Spectator David Patrikarakos Anuradha Roy (image: Getty) David Patrikarakos 14 July 2018 9:00 AM All the Lives We Never Lived Anuradha Roy MacLehose, pp.336, £16.99 ‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist, his childhood nickname (after Dostoevsky’s protagonist in The Idiot) remains. It is the first sign that this is a novel about people out of sync with their times and their surroundings. Abandoned by his mother as a child, Myshkin has received a letter ‘pulsing with the energy every unopened letter in the world has’. It involves his mother but he cannot bear to open it. Instead he narrates her life, and his own, one of tending trees with commendable diligence, and waiting for her return. As with Roy’s previous work, the prose is intensely visual. The novel is a vista of ‘bulbous s...