anuradha roy

Two interviews, one for The Folded Earth and the other for An Atlas of Impossible Longing . In the first one, Sunil Sethi of NDTV's Just Books asks in detail about writing methods, memories, places, people, and whether writing about what he called miniaturised landscapes means you are writing of isolated worlds. Watch it here . The second interview was done via the Internet, where readers quizzed me on a range of topics for a whole hour. I hadn't thought I would survive it, but it turned out to be a very interesting hour, interrupted by sounds of explosions -- there were fireworks going on at a wedding nearby. Watch it here.

From  Courtney Shannon Strand , former About.com Guide “The story of how I came to find and read Anuradha Roy’s beautiful novel,  An Atlas of Impossible Longing , is not as long as the distance I went to find it. In Delhi en route to a literature festival in Jaipur this past January, I stumbled totally by chance into a reception honoring British publisher Christopher MacLehose. His hosts, Rukun Advani and Anuradha Roy, run a terrific independent academic press, Permanent Black. Talking about the role of academic publishers in India, then how a clearly significant press composed of two people, doing everything, managed to function: that was my introduction to Anuradha Roy. I shortly learned— not terribly directly —that she had written a novel, one published in India and numerous other countries. Notes were made, and when I was in Faqir Chand and Sons’ legendary bookshop the next day, a Picador India edition of  An Atlas of Impossible Longing  was miraculously (...

"Every once in a great while, a novel comes along to remind you why you rummage through shelves in the first place. Why you peck like a magpie past the bright glitter of publishers’ promises. Why you read. No “news hook” will have brought you to it. No famous name on the spine will suggest what’s in store. But as you slip into the book’s pages, you sense you are entering a singular creation, a richly populated world. Curiosity overcomes you. Before long, you are surrendering to the voice of a confident narrator, the arc of an unfamiliar story. And then, suddenly, you are swept away in a tale that is bristling with incident, steeped in the human condition, buffeted by winds of fate. This, you think, is the feeling you had as you read “ Great Expectations ” or “ Sophie’s Choice ” or “ The Kite Runner .” This is why you read fiction at all" MARIE ARANA, WASHINGTON POST Read the  complete review here

I discovered a fabulous new website called Largeheartedboy, for books and music, when they asked me to write about the music in my first book. In their Book Notes  series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. I went to the site and looked up the music other writers had written about and was entranced -- how extraordinary to discover a book through music and new music through books! What could possibly be more obviously a good thing, yet so rarely done? A still from The Cloud-capped Star . A beautiful song from this film is in my playlist. When I thought about it, I realized that  An Atlas of Impossible Longing  is filled with different kinds of music. Some of it was in my own head as I was writing it, but a lot of music is referred to in the book as well. India has its own sophisticated, courtly, classical traditions, both instrumental and vocal; there is devotional music, both Hindu and Sufi; there ar...

Goodreads.com is giving away 5 copies of An Atlas of Impossible Longing . Introducing the book, it says, "In the tradition of Henning Mankell, Per Petterson, and Stieg Larsson, Roy is a major foreign success just waiting to storm the American literary scene. This is the novel that will usher her entrance, portraying several generations of family life in India with the sort of warmth, tension, and lavish detail that bestsellers are made of." Here's the link to the contest. The New Yorker reviewed the book in its brief notes this week, saying: “Houses serve as powerful metaphors of refuge and claustrophobia, and the novel chronicles both the strength of domestic bonds and the wounds that parents and children, husbands and wives, inflict on each other.” And here too by coincidence Henning Mankell's new book is reviewed just above mine, which pleases me no end because I am a huge fan of Mankell's crime fiction. For those who can get past the New Yorker payw...

Soft, grey, rainy morning in the hills. My dog has decided there is no place more sensible than a duvet. Her nose emerges every now and then like a radar to figure out if her staff (ie us) is at hard work in the catering department. Then she buries herself again. A review of Atlas, meanwhile, in a Cleveland paper:  "Roy's writing is nuanced and luminous, never hurried, leading the reader through the lush Bengali landscape and into the hidden terrain of desire and loss". Read the complete review here. The Folded Earth was reviewed too, in Outlook . " Roy joins Allan Sealy, whose elegiac The Everest Hotel also asks: is the way of life in colonial hill stations falling apart as they grapple with inept modernity?... As with An Atlas of Impossible Longing , Roy unravels the small-town terrain with certitude. At one level, her prose is a dirge for the Kumaon hills. At another, a Pickwickian humour infuses it with robust charm." What is on the work table right no...

The first US reviews of An Atlas of Impossible Longing are just coming in from the blogs. In a review to return to for comfort on the bad days, Brenda Youngerman writes: "... without a doubt the best book I have read in the past six months! It is the kind of book that stays with you throughout the day. The kind of book that resonates within your mind as you think, feel, breathe, do your daily chores. The kind of book that makes you stop and take notice of things around you that you would not otherwise stop and take notice of." Read the complete review here . The Scarlet Letter , in a perceptive review,  says: " The novel is filled with plots and subplots and points of view, all intertwining and forming, like the lines of Mukunda's palm, an atlas of impossible longing.  Desire is the driving force in the novel: desire for love, for escape, for money and success and for all sorts of unfulfilled dreams. At the center of the atlas is the family house in Songarh, crumbl...