Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Nov 2018
288 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
A poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present-day about a son's quest to uncover the truth about his mother.
In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman. The man was in fact German, but in small-town India in those days, all white foreigners were largely thought of as British.
So begins the story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, a rebellious, alluring artist who abandons parenthood and marriage to follow her primal desire for freedom.
Though freedom may be stirring in the air of India, across the world the Nazis have risen to power in Germany. At this point of crisis, a German artist from Gayatri's past seeks her out. His arrival ignites passions she has long been forced to suppress.
What follows is her life as pieced together by her son, a journey that takes him through India and Dutch-held Bali. Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, he comes to understand his long-lost mother, and the connections between strife at home and a war-torn universe overtaken by patriotism.
With her signature "precise and poetic" (The Independent) writing, Anuradha Roy's All the Lives We Never Lived is a spellbinding and emotionally powerful saga about family, identity, and love.
"Starred Review. This mesmerizing exploration of the darker consequences of freedom, love, and loyalty is an astonishing display of Roy's literary prowess." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Roy (Sleeping on Jupiter, 2016) peppers her novel with intricate descriptions of small-town India and weaves an eloquent and tragic story of straitjacketed lives upended when history and personal ambition intersect." - Booklist
"This novel has an epic feel but also portrays the feelings of an abandoned child and captured woman while strongly evoking the sounds, scents, plants, people, and social structures of India at the time." - Library Journal
"Lyrical, subtle, [and] finely observant. .... A novel of history, both global and personal, gracefully wrought." - Kirkus
"Anuradha Roy blends historical fact and remarkable real-life characters into her tale, which takes freedom, in all its messy complexity, as its theme ... Amid the atmospheric detailing there are pin-sharp modern resonances with modern India's nationalism and punishing patriarchy." - The Times (UK)
"[Roy] is a writer of great subtlety and intelligence, who understands that emotional power comes from the steady accretion of detail…a beautifully written and compelling story of how families fall apart and of what remains in the aftermath." - The Guardian (UK)
"Roy's writing is a joy." - Financial Times (UK)
"Poetic, elegiac ... Roy's eye is tender. ... The scope of All the Lives We Never Lived is vast but also personal." - Irish Times
"What makes this novel so special is the sinuous way Anuradha Roy seamlessly and masterfully shuttles between time, overlaying the past with the present, mystery with knowledge to cumulatively create a brilliant tapestry that is the story." - Chigozie Obioma, Man Booker Prize finalist for The Fishermen
This information about All the Lives We Never Lived 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 the author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Folded Earth, Sleeping on Jupiter, All the Lives We Never Lived, and Earthspinner. She is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the DSC Prize for Fiction, the Crossword Prize, and the Tata Book of the Year Award. She has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Man Asia Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 15 languages. In 2020, she was conferred the Nilimarani Sahitya Samman for Outstanding Contribution to Indian Literature. She works as a graphic designer at Permanent Black, an independent press she runs with Rukun Advani. She lives in Ranikhet, India.
Link to Anuradha Roy's Website
Name Pronunciation
Anuradha Roy: AH-nuh-rahd-ha
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The Stone Home
by Crystal Hana Kim
A moving family drama and coming-of-age story revealing a dark corner of South Korean history.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
