Everything the Light Touches
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
‘A novel like none other’ AMITAV GHOSH
‘A masterpiece’ AVNI DOSHI
‘Wise, funny, touching’ ROBERT MACFARLANE
Winner, Sushila Devi 2023
Winner, Atta Galatta 2023 for Best Fiction
Winner, AutHer Award 2023 for Fiction
Finalist, Tata Live Award for Fiction 2023
Longlisted, 2023 JCB Prize for Literature
Shortlisted, Valley of Words Awards 2023 for English Fiction
A Best Book of 2022 in The New Yorker
Four lives, uniquely linked, in a story that journeys across continents and centuries…
For Shai, lost and drifting, a visit to her hometown in India’s Northeast offers the possibility of new ways of living.
For Evelyn, a Cambridge student, scientific inspiration guides her to the forests of the lower Himalayas and a world she has only read about.
For Johann, a German writer, travelling through Italy inspires him to develop ground-breaking ideas that will cement his place in history.
And for a young Swede, an unwavering curiosity for Earth’s natural wonders takes him on an expedition that will forever alter the way we understand the world around us.
A multi-layered literary saga bringing together people and places that seem, at first, far removed, Everything the Light Touches is a marvellous exploration of our ways of seeing, told through the eyes of four unexpectedly intertwined people.
About the author
Janice Pariat is the award-winning author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories, Seahorse: A Novel, and the international bestseller The Nine-Chambered Heart. She lives in India.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pariat (The Nine-Chambered Heart) weaves the stories of two women's travels in India with a narrative involving German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in her lush and layered latest. Shai returns from contemporary Delhi to her hometown in India's mountainous Meghalaya region. There, she's stunned to learn Oiñ, her childhood nanny, is gravely ill, and she strikes out for the remote village of Mawmalang to check in on her. In a parallel narrative set in the early 1900s, Cambridge University graduate student Evelyn travels to Calcutta under the guise of searching for a suitor while surreptitiously visiting botanical gardens and wandering the forests of northeastern India. Evelyn eventually connects with a young would-be suitor, but she's more interested in her search for a rare plant, which leads her to take a solo hike deep in the forest. Goethe, who was also a botanist, comes into play while making a 1780s sojourn to Italy as part of a natural philosophy project, where he develops the ideas that will prove deeply influential to Evelyn. Shai, meanwhile, discovers her green thumb while visiting with Oiñ's family. There's an abundance of lush details of northeastern India, and the smooth synthesis of ideas and narrative keeps everything together. This is a feast.
