All the Lives We Never Lived

**NOW SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD**

"A writer of great subtlety and intelligence . . . a beautifully written and
compelling story of how families fall apart and what remains of the aftermath"
Kamila Shamsie, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018

"The book everyone is talking about for the summer" Lorraine Candy, Sunday
Times

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 enthralling 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.

"One of India's greatest living authors" - O, The Oprah Magazine

"Roy's writing is a joy" - Financial Times