All the Lives We Never Lived

War, nationalism, and trees shape lives in unforeseeable ways in this novel about a family and a country struggling with enormous transformations. In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman - so begins the story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, who is driven to rebel against tradition and follow her artist`s instinct for freedom. Freedom of a different kind is in the air across India. The fight against British rule is reaching a critical turn. The Nazis have come to power in Germany. At this point of crisis, two strangers arrive in Gayatri`s town, opening up for her the vision of other possible lives. What took Myshkin`s mother from India to Dutch-held Bali in the 1930s, ripping a knife through his comfortingly familiar environment? Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, Myshkin comes to understand the connections between anguish at home and a war-torn universe overtaken by patriotism. Anuradha Roy`s moving novel is a powerful parable for our times, telling the story of men and women trapped in a dangerous era uncannily similar to the present. Impassioned, elegiac, and gripping, it brims with the same genius that has brought Roy`s earlier fiction international renown.