The Earthspinner: A Novel
About this ebook
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.
About the author
Anuradha Roy is the author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Folded Earth, Sleeping on Jupiter, and All the Lives We Never Lived. 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.
