She lives in the picturesque hill station of Ranikhet, in the distant Himalaya mountains, and commutes to New Delhi, where she works for an academic publisher that specializes in South Asia.Īpart from its setting just outside Calcutta, Roy’s “Atlas” is hardly distant. Its author, a first-time novelist, is no one you’ve heard of, and yet she is also no stranger to books. This, you think, is the feeling you had as you read “ Great Expectations” or “ Sophie’s Choice” or “ The Kite Runner.” This is why you read fiction at all.Īnuradha Roy’s “ An Atlas of Impossible Longing” is such a book, a novel to convince us that boldly drawn sagas with larger-than-life characters are still possible in a relentlessly postmodern world. And then, suddenly, you are swept away in a tale that is bristling with incident, steeped in the human condition, buffeted by winds of fate. Before long, you are surrendering to the voice of a confident narrator, the arc of an unfamiliar story. But as you slip into the book’s pages, you sense you are entering a singular creation, a richly populated world. No famous name on the spine will suggest what’s in store. No “news hook” will have brought you to it. Why you peck like a magpie past the bright glitter of publishers’ promises. Every once in a great while, a novel comes along to remind you why you rummage through shelves in the first place.
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