An Atlas of Impossible Longing - Hardcover

Roy, Anuradha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847244777 ISBN 13: 9781847244772

Publisher: MacLehose Press, 2008

Synopsis

The story is of three generations of an Indian family, brilliantly told, in which a sensitive and intelligent foundling boy orphan who is casteless and without religion and Bakul, the motherless granddaughter of the house, grow up together. The boy, Mukunda, spends his time as a servant in the house or reading the books of Mrs Barnum, an Anglo-Englishwoman whose life was saved long ago by Bakul's grandmother, by now demented by loneliness. Mrs Barnum gives Mukunda the run of her house, but as he and Bakul grow, they become aware that their intense closeness is becoming something else, and Bakul's father is warned to separate them. He banishes Mukunda to a school in Calcutta, where in the years after Partition he prospers, and whence in time he will return to rediscover all that he has lost.

The novel begins in 1907 with the founding of a factory in Songarh, a small provincial town where narrow attitudes prevail. Amulya and Kananbala have two sons and as their family grows, and the house and their garden too, a microcosm of a society develops. It is scholarly, eccentric, hide-bound, fraught with drama, destined to self-destruct. The many strands of this intensely fashioned narrative converge when Mukunda, by now a successful businessman, returns to Songarh years after he has been exiled from the only home he knew, to resolve the family's destiny.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

"He scrutinised my palm for long minutes, and I looked with him, as if I had never seen it before. It was creased, untidy, crowded with crosses and wild strokes slashing it in two. I have seen palms that have scarcely any lines. Mine was not one of them, far from it. I waited as if for a verdict.
`A veritable atlas,' he said, his fingers tracing the longer lines on my palm. `What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition!'
`I wanted to... I mean I was hoping...'
`Want, want, hope, hope,' the astrologer parroted, `this is what your palm says too, moshai, your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings.' He poked my lifeline and said, `Nothing but longing.'"
This is a love story - as passionate as it is poignant - about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else.

From the Inside Flap

Anuradha Roy's epic story of a Bengali family in the twentieth century begins on the edge of a mud-brown river in spate; swollen and menacing, infinitely destructive. Here, in a place of intense colours and spicy scents, where jasmines bloom in suburbia and the tiger's roar carries through the heavy nights, a family, new to town, makes small-talk over dinner.
Beneath their trickle of chit-chat, deep currents surge. Nirmal dreams of happiness with a widowed cousin that cannot be; his motherless daughter, Bakul, thinks only of escaping the tedium of dinner. She wants to be running wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family.
In a room at the top of the house, the matriarch babbles nonsense, gleefully shrieking obscenities at the top of her voice. Meanwhile, Amulya, the weary patriarch, shapes and reshapes his exquisite garden while his dynasty crumbles around him.
Anuradha Roy writes with a rhythm that seduces its reader into an intricate, enchanting tale of a family's love and longing, rejection and acceptance, conformity and rebellion. Her story is heartbreaking in its nostalgia for what is vanishing for ever, and its yearning for what may never come.

Edition details

• Publisher: MacLehose Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847244777
• ISBN 13: 9781847244772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320