The King's English Bookshop

The Far Field (Hardcover)

By Madhuri Vijay

$27.00

ISBN: 9780802128409

Availability: On Our Shelves Now

Published: Grove Press - January 15th, 2019

I fell instantly under the spell of The Far Field. Reading in the first couple of pages of regrets expressed for things that had happened six years before, seeing a sleeping mother, a mysterious visitor, I wanted to know more. I wondered with the child, Shalini, what could be behind the lethal tongue of her quick-witted, unbridled mother or the visits of the man from Kashmir who appeared from time to time, telling them stories as they sat on the couch during the day when the father was at work. My curiosity snagged and my empathy stirred, I made my willing way with Shalini, now grown, as she traveled to Kashmir on an improbable search for the man from her childhood and for answers to that original mystery of who her mother was. Following Shalini from childhood into adulthood, from Bangalore to a small mountain village in Kashmir that opened her eyes and her heart, I found myself transformed—not just by the bewitching language and the irresistible pull of the story but also by the humanity and cleareyed compassion of the teller. A compassion that allows reader and teller alike to recognize truth and then to forgive—oneself as well as others. This isn’t just a good book but a passionate, farseeing and utterly brilliant novel.