All the Lives We Never Lived

Myshkin, now a solitary horticulturist in his sixties, still lives on the grounds of his childhood home in the north Indian town of Muntazir. In 1937, when he was nine, his mother Gayatri left. As a girl she had travelled with her art-loving father to Java and Bali, where she met the German painter Walter Spies and dreamed of becoming an artist; after her father's death she was married to a much older schoolteacher devoted to the independence struggle. The arrival of two strangers in town opens other lives to her. Decades later, a parcel of her letters to a former neighbour reaches Myshkin and gives her own voice to the story, set against India's fight against colonial rule and a world sliding into war.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

336 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Historical, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

India, Indonesia, 1930s–1940s

First published

2018 by Hachette India

Author's age

51 when first published

ISBN

9789351952381 (Hachette India, India)

9780857058171 (MacLehose Press, United Kingdom)

9781982100513 (Atria Books, United States)

9780857058188 (MacLehose Press, United Kingdom)

9781982100520 (Washington Square Press, United States)

9789388322195 (Hachette India, India)

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