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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Everything the Light Touches Synopsis
A Best Book of the Year in The New Yorker - Winner, Sushila Devi Award 2023 - Winner, Atta Galatta 2023 for Best Fiction - Winner, AutHer Award 2023 for Fiction - Finalist, Tata Live Award for Fiction 2023 - Longlisted, 2023 JCB Prize for Literature - Shortlisted, Valley of Words Awards 2023 for English Fiction
"Wise, funny, touching, wide-ranging, deep-delving; whip-smart dialogue and graceful, paced sentences, thousands upon thousands of them. Written by a novelist with the eye of a poet, and a poet with the narrative powers of a novelist, this is a book that needed to be written, that tells true things, and is entirely its own being."--Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words and Underland
One of the most acclaimed and revered writers of her generation returns with her most ambitious novel yet--an elegant, multi-layered work, rich in imagination and exquisitely told, that interweaves a quartet of journeys across continents and centuries.
As emotionally resonant as Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, as inspired as Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, as inventive as Louisa Hall's Speak, and as visionary as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Everything the Light Touches is Janice Pariat's magnificent epic of travelers, of discovery, of time, of science, of human connection, and of the impermanent nature of the universe and life itself--a bold and brilliant saga that unfolds through the adventures and experiences of four intriguing characters.
Shai is a young woman in modern India. Lost and drifting, she travels to her country's Northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with indigenous communities, ways of being that realign and renew her.
Evelyn is a student of science in Edwardian England. Inspired by Goethe's botanical writings, she leaves Cambridge on a quest to wander the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas.
Linnaeus, a botanist and taxonomist who famously declared "God creates; Linnaeus organizes," sets off on an expedition to an unfamiliar world, the far reaches of Lapland in 1732.
Goethe is a philosopher, writer, and one of the greatest minds of his age. While traveling through Italy in the 1780s, he formulates his ideas for "The Metamorphosis of Plants," a little-known, revelatory text that challenges humankind's propensity to reduce plants--and the world--into immutable parts.
Drawn richly from scientific and botanical ideas, Everything the Light Touches is a swirl of ever-expanding themes: the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban and rural life, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and "song and stone." Pulsating at its center is the dichotomy between different ways of seeing, those that fix and categorize and those that free and unify. Pariat questions the imposition of fixity--of our obsession to place permanence on plants, people, stories, knowledge, land--where there is only movement, fluidity, and constant transformation. "To be still," says a character in the book, "is to be without life."
Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet as it artfully reveals, all is resonance; all is connection.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780063210042 |
| Publication date: |
25th October 2022 |
| Author: |
Janice Pariat |
| Publisher: |
Harpervia an imprint of HarperCollins |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
512 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Historical Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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