Critics' Opinion:
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Published May 2022
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government.
In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King's daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy―literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.
With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion―and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world's Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King's childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the U.S. to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life―Athena herself.
The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.
"[A] potent debut...Vara ingeniously identifies portentous links between history and the book's present, such as the parallel Athena draws between the rise and fall of the East India Company with the Shareholder government run by her father. And with King 'cursed' at birth, Vara succeeds at making her family portrait the stuff of myth. This is not to be missed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Alternating between Rao's childhood in a small Indian village, his early student days in the US, and the dystopian society in which Athena has to function, Vara's original debut delivers challenging and weighty themes with a sure hand." - Booklist (starred review)
"Vara's strengths are in her clever wordplay and trenchant observations...Some of Vara's minor characters are less well drawn, though, and the line between satire and stereotype at times grows thin...Even for tech geniuses, climate change may soon be beyond any algorithm's ability to repair." - Kirkus Reviews
"An exacting writer of the digital age, journalist Vara makes her debut with a trippy novel that marries the family saga with a biotech satire...Vara has a gift for humanizing the invisible labor that happens behind our screens. Who, if anyone, can really separate themselves from the digital ties that bind us?" - Vulture
"A brilliant and beautifully written book about capitalism and the patriarchy, about Dalit India and digital America, about power and family and love." -The Observer (UK)
"Utterly, thrillingly brilliant. From the first unforgettable page to the last, The Immortal King Rao is a form-inventing, genre-exploding triumph. Vauhini Vara's bravura debut has reshaped my brain and expanded my heart." - R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
"In this richly imagined saga spanning past, present, and future, Vauhini Vara brings us a visionary who makes the world in his image, and the strong-willed daughter whose life could be his final legacy. Vara's brilliance is matched only by her heart, and this unforgettable debut will challenge what you think you know about genius, capitalism, consciousness, and what it means to be human." - Anna North, author of Outlawed
"Vara comes out the gate with a masterwork: a book that is three great novels in one–the tale of a thriving and chaotic Dalit clan in the first decades of independent India; an immigrant success story in '80s America; and a dystopian nightmare of the post-Trump future." - Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
"The Immortal King Rao is an odyssey of the grandest scale, spanning over a century and charting a Dalit immigrant's rise to world power. Vauhini Vara fuses intricate family lore with the history of tech solutionism and capitalist demagoguery, pointing forward to a dangerously likely future of corporate dominion; she writes with the meticulous clarity of a longform journalist, the explosive force of a Trident missile, and the ambition of her own brilliant protagonists." - Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens
This information about The Immortal King Rao 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.
Vauhini Vara has worked as a Wall Street Journal technology reporter and as the business editor for The New Yorker. Her fiction has been honored by the O. Henry Prize and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. From a Dalit background, she lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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