Press Release

Everything the Light Touches, by Janice Pariat

HarperCollins

presents

Everything the Light Touches

by Janice Pariat

A novel that brings together continents and centuries, characters and ideas, script and song, with startling playfulness and wisdom

‘Listen, now, to how the tree, the tallest-in-the-world tree, was felled; how seven tribes were rendered earthbound; how its branches smacked the lands of the south, laying them flat and rich with the mulch of foliage, how the trunk crashed and carved our hills. Look how they bear the mark through all the ages still.

Listen, listen, for a story told once may not be told again.’

HB | Fiction | 512 pp | Rs 799
Releasing 27 October 2022
Publishing in the US, the UK and India


PRAISE FOR THE NOVEL

‘A novel like none other’
AMITAV GHOSH

‘Wise, funny, touching, wide-ranging, deep-delving, whip-smart, graceful’
ROBERT MACFARLANE

‘A novel of great charm, curiosity and adventure’
ANJUM HASAN

‘Capacious and wise … a magnificent reminder that the natural world does not lie outside of ourselves’
NILANJANA S. ROY

‘Evocative, intelligent and deeply thought-provoking’
PRANAY LAL

‘Timely and timeless – a masterpiece’
AVNI DOSHI

‘Ingenious, elegant, passionate’
MADHURI VIJAY

‘A novel that touched me deeply’
S. HAREESH

‘A gift to those who question the forms and preoccupations of the modern novel’
SHUBHANGI SWARUP

Author Janice Pariat says, “Everything the Light Touches has been in my head – and heart – for so long, growing from a seed of an idea in 2014 to this: four major characters, and a gently-entangled quartet of ‘travel’ narratives, strung across continents and centuries. Each of them, in their own way, is asking: How do we see the world around us? In fixity or fluidity? In categories or unity? For me, these are important questions because I believe they shape, in foundational ways, how we relate to our planet, to each other, to all living beings.

Writing the book has been an immense challenge – it is my most ambitious novel yet – and I am thrilled that it has found a home in the safe, supportive hands of HarperCollins India. They also published my previous work, The Nine-Chambered Heart, and I am delighted to continue working with them on this book.”

Rahul Soni, Executive Editor – Literary, HarperCollins India, says, “Janice Pariat has published three books of fiction thus far – all quietly accomplished in their different ways, and well loved. Her new novel, Everything the Light Touches, however, is an extraordinarily bold and ambitious one. I have seen it grow and flower over the past few years, from the germ of an idea into a work tackling big, urgent themes with great structural and formal inventiveness. It is a work that will propel her into the very front rank of Indian novelists writing today, and one that I’m truly, truly excited to be publishing. If there’s one novel you read in 2022, make it this one.”


ABOUT THE BOOK

In Everything the Light Touches we meet many travellers: Shai, a young Indian woman who journeys to India’s northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with indigenous communities, ways of living that realign and renew her. Evelyn, an Edwardian student at Cambridge who, inspired by Goethe’s botanical writings, embarks on a journey seeking out the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, botanist and taxonomist, who famously declared “God creates; Linnaeus organizes” and led an expedition to Lapland in 1732. And Goethe himself, who travelled through Italy in the 1780s, formulating his ideas for a revelatory text that called for a re-examination of our propensity to reduce plants—and the world—into immutable parts.

Drawing richly from scientific ideas, the novel plunges into a whirl of ever-expanding themes, and the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban life and the countryside, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and “song and stone.” At the heart of the book lies a tussle between different ways of seeing—those that fix and categorize, and those that free and unify.

Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet all is resonance, we discover; all is connection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories, Seahorse: A Novel, and the international bestseller The Nine-Chambered Heart. She was the recipient of the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Janice’s work has been translated into ten languages. She teaches at Ashoka University, and lives between New Delhi and Shillong with a cat of many names.

 

For reviews, excerpts, interviews and more information, please contact Shivendra Singh at
shivendra.singh@harpercollins.co.in

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