An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Already a sensation around the world: family life meets historical romance in an astonishing novel about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else, marking the signal American debut of a writer who richly deserves her international acclaim.

On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. Here, lives intertwine and unravel. A widower struggles with his love for an unmarried cousin. Bakul, a motherless daughter, runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. Confined in a room at the top of the house, a matriarch goes slowly mad; her husband searches for its cause as he shapes and reshapes his garden. As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else, and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. He prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, but his thoughts stay with his home, with Bakul, with all that he has lost—and he knows that he must return.

Customer Reviews:

Intergenerational Novel of India

By Bonnie Brody "Book Lover and Knitter" - April 15, 2011

An Atlas of Impossible Longing - The title of this book alone drew me in; that and I'm partial to books about India. This is a fine book on many levels and I was not disappointed. It's a multigenerational novel, a great love story, a cross-cultural learning experience, and a book about yearning, hope, loss, money and betrayal. It captures the big themes of life and does a great job of keeping the reader turning the pages.

The story starts out in 1907 when Amulya takes his family from Calcutta to Songarh, a small town on the edge of the jungle. He has a wife and two grown sons, along with one daughter-in law. He builds a house in the middle of nowhere. There are no other houses nearby except for one belonging to an English couple across the street. There is dirt, mud, the screech of monkies and not much else. Kananbala, Amulya's wife, gradually loses her sanity from the loneliness and utters irrelevant profanities at the oddest times. Amulya confines Kananbala to her... read more

A stately pace for a family saga of 20th century India

By Laurie - April 5, 2011

It did not end the way I expected.

And the last part is best in this modestly-paced novel of 20th century India.

In An Atlas of Impossible Longing, publisher-writer Anuradha Roy (not to be confused with Arundati Roy, author of The God of Small Things) traces one family's dysfunction through three generations, offering up a tale of caste and ill-fated love and decaying houses. It begins with patriarch Amulya's decision to move from Calcutta to a small town in Bengal to build a stately home in the country (mining country, at that) for his large family. Then, as sometimes happens in novels about India these days (think The Inheritance of Loss or A Fine Balance) we witness the ravages wrought by a patriarchal culture and by the larger caste system as well. Women, bullied and battered by their solipsistic husbands, go slowly insane or act out maliciously toward socially inferior women. Boys are raised to be as self-absorbed as their fathers and girls to serve them... read more

You feel the heat of India in these pages

By Carla Ford - July 23, 2011

Steamy is a good word for this novel. From the first page, you feel as if you are India. The descriptive language is so vivid that you feel the heat, you smell the flowers, you are drawn in by the intensity of feeling and the passion that is a part of the lives of this Indian family. Building their house on the outskirts of a small town, Amulya and Kananbala are the only Indians living in this secluded area, surrounded by wilderness. With only her husband and two sons to talk to, Kananbala becomes confined to a room at the top of the house, and gradually loses her mind. The novel tells the story of three generations. Amulya and Kananbala, have two sons, Kamal and Nirmal, and the family adopts an orphan named Mukunda. Kamal and his wife are childless, but Nirmal marries and has a daughter named Bakul. This is a novel about love and loss, and the passion of the characters is what creates the feeling that you are there, feeling the heat of all of the emotion so strongly expressed on the... read more