A young woman finds herself chasing shadows when she returns to the city that haunts her dreams, in Anuradha Roy’s vivid evocation of north India.
Jarmuli: a city of temples, a centre of healing on the edge of the ocean. Nomi, a young girl, is taken from her family and finds herself in an ashram, overseen by a charismatic guru. But Guruji’s charm masks a predatory menace, and Nomi faces danger beyond her understanding. Twenty years later, Nomi returns to Jarmuli, seeking the truth about what happened to her and her family.
"Roy’s chiselled prose allows her to expose the endless, treacherous hypocrisies of Indian society ... India is evoked in the ginger and crushed cloves of a seaside tea-stall...in the shame of speaking about sexual violence ... In tackling these issues, Roy has used the most potent weapon in a writer’s arsenal – the form of the novel, with its ability to simultaneously be universal and particular – to boldly unmask the hidden face of Indian spirituality and the rampant sexual abuse in its unholy confines." - Meena Kandasamy, The Guardian
Anuradha Roy is an Indian author, born in 1967 in Kolkata. She is the author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Folded Earth, All The Lives We Never Lived, and Sleeping on Jupiter - which won the DSC Prize for Fiction in 2016 as well as being long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. She lives in Ranikhet, India.