From the critically acclaimed, Booker Prize-nominated author of
Sleeping on Jupiter and All the Lives We Never Lived, an incisive
and moving novel about the struggle for creative achievement in a world
consumed by growing fanaticism and political upheaval.
One night, Elango has a dream that consumes him, driving him to give it
shape. The potter is determined to create a terracotta horse whose
beauty will be reason enough for its existence. Yet he cannot pin down
from where it has galloped into his mind. The Mahabharata? The Trojan
horse legend? His anonymous potter-ancestors? Once it's finished, he
does not know where his creation will belong. In a temple compound?
Gracing a hotel lobby? Or should he gift it to Zohra, the woman he
loves, yet despairs of ever marrying.
The astral, indefinable force driving Elango toward forbidden love and
creation has unleashed other currents. He unexpectedly falls into a
complicated relationship with a neighborhood girl who is beginning her
bewildering journey into adulthood. He is suddenly adopted by a lost dog
who steals his heart. While Elango's life is changing, the community
around him is as well, but it is a transformation driven by inflammatory
passions of a different kind. Here, people, animals, and even the gods
live on a knife's edge and the consequences of daring to dream are
cataclysmic.
Moving between India and England, The Earthspinner reflects the many
ways in which the East and the West's paths converge and diverge in
constant conflict. Anuradha Roy breathes new life into ancient myths,
giving allegorical shape to the terrifying war on reason and the
imagination waged by increasingly powerful forces of fanaticism. An epic
that is a metaphor for our age, The Earthspinner is an intricate,
wrenching novel about the transformed ways of loving and living in an
increasingly uncertain world.
