Everything the Light Touches

LoveReading Says

Crossing continents and centuries through four distinct - yet connected - characters, Janice Pariat's Everything the Light Touches casts a captivating, slow-burning, lyrical spell. It’s a story of seekers, voyagers and adventurers. A tale of story-tellers, scientists and thinkers that reveals deep-rooted connections to the earth, and the essentialness of the impulse to move, explore, and transform.

We meet Shai in contemporary India, a lost young woman who travels to a remote rural region and reconnects with her childhood, her country, her sense of who she is, and who she might become. The community she spends time with are soulfully connected to the earth: “Without our land, we are lost”. “The more they try to take it away, the more we will fight. Not because we are its owners, but because we are its caretakers.”

Then there’s Evelyn, a Cambridge-educated scientist in Edwardian England whose story begins aboard a boat bound for India. “Is this the journey’s beginning or its end? Where will it take her? To what will it bring her back? What might she learn? What will she see anew?” As with Shai, Evelyn’s curiosity and quest for knowledge and understanding is palpable. In Evelyn’s case, Goethe’s writings on botany have driven her to explore Himalayan forests.

Talking of whom, slipping back to 1786, we travel around Italy the company of Johann Goethe as he develops his ideas for a work called “The Metamorphosis of Plants”. Meanwhile, a young Swede writes sublime nature-infused poetry throughout his expedition to distant northern wildernesses.

Tender, mesmeric and pulsating with its characters’ longings and distinct ways of seeing and living, this is a beautifully resonant novel.

Joanne Owen

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