Author: Anuradha Roy
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9780330456784
Description
Anuradha Roy’s story of a family in the first half of the twentieth century begins on the edge of a mud-brown river in spate, swollen, menacing infinitely destructive. Here in a remote town in north India, an eccentric patriarch shelters an abandoned child, not realizing that the boy will transform his world.
Beneath the trickle of the family’s ordinary life, deep currents swell. Nirmal dreams of a happiness that cannot be with a widowed cousin. His mother feels her grasp over reality slipping even as her husband, Amulya lost in his own world, shapes and reshapes his exquisite garden. Meanwhile, Nirmal’s daughter Bakul runs wild with the orphan Mukunda.And as their closeness changes into something else; it threatens to destroy those around them.
Populated by intensely imagined places and people, this is a brilliantly told romance as well as an elegy for lost landscapes. Anuradha Roy writes with a rhythm that seduces us into an intricate, enchanting tale. Her story is heartbreaking in its yearning for what is vanishing forever and it’s longing for what may never come.
Contents
Prologue
Part I The Drowned House
Part II The Ruined Fort
Part III The Water's Edge