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Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, a novel about violence, love, and religion in modern India
On a train bound for the seaside town of Jarmuli, known for its temples, three elderly women meet a young documentary filmmaker named Nomi, whose braided hair, tattoos, and foreign air set her apart. At a brief stop en route, the women witness a sudden assault on Nomi that leaves her stranded as the train pulls away.
Later in Jarmuli, among pilgrims, priests, and ashrams, the women disembark only to find that Nomi has managed to arrive on her own. What is someone like her, clearly not a worshipper, doing in this remote place? Over the next five days, the women live out their long-planned dream of a holiday together; their temple guide pursues a forbidden love; and Nomi is joined by a photographer to scout locations for a documentary.
As their lives overlap and collide, Nomi's past comes into focus, and the serene surface of the town is punctured by violence and abuse as Jarmuli is revealed as a place with a long, dark history that transforms all who encounter it. A haunting, vibrant novel that was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and short-listed for the Hindu Literary Prize, Anuradha Roy's Sleeping on Jupiter is a brilliantly told story of contemporary India from an internationally acclaimed writer.
"The overlapping stories make for a rich and absorbing consideration of where the past ends and the present begins." - Publishers Weekly
"Though this is far from a perfect novel, there's enough spark in the first-person narration to make it worthwhile." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Sleeping on Jupiter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Rukun Advani
Anuradha Roy is a writer and potter. She was born in Kolkata and grew up mostly in Hyderabad, India. She has written five novels. Her first, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was translated into sixteen languages. Sleeping on Jupiter, her third novel, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. All the Lives We Never Lived won the 2022 Sahitya Akademi Award, among India's highest literary honours, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her non-fiction has been published in Guardian, Paris Review, Indian Express, LitHub and elsewhere. Roy lives in Ranikhet, where she is a graphic designer at Permanent Black, a scholarly press she runs with her partner.
Link to Anuradha Roy's Website
Name Pronunciation
Anuradha Roy: AH-nuh-rahd-ha
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