"Set in contemporary India, this captivating, quietly stirring debut explores losing and re-establishing identity, and the rise of religious fundamentalism, through a mother and daughter who lose their anchor."
Rooted in female relationships, and ideas around how personal identities are forged, broken and reassembled, Anindita Ghose’s The Illuminated is a beautifully-written novel that quietly seeps into your thoughts and sheds a glowing lunar light on hidden truths.
Centred around two women — mother and daughter Shashi and Tara — it’s an in-depth character study underpinned by what comes in the wake of loss, intergenerational and social differences, and external forces that threaten to cast us adrift.
When Shashi’s celebrated, successful architect husband dies suddenly, she hasn’t just lost a husband, she’s also lost herself, and to an extent she’d never anticipated. At the same time, Tara, her independent daughter, is losing herself in a relationship with an older man just as she’s lost her anchor of a father. As the two women drift and try to re-ground themselves, religious fundamentalism threatens to sweep them into its swell.
The Illuminated really is remarkable in its poignant portrayal of how our sense of self often hinges on those we love, with its sense of coming to a state of illumination reinforced through section headers relating to phases of the moon.
A remarkable debut novel about women's relationships with each other and with the men in their lives and the rise of fundamentalism in India today.
'When the light shifts, you see the world differently.' A superbly nuanced work of fiction, Anindita Ghose's first novel The Illuminated revolves around two women: Shashi and Tara. After the sudden death of her celebrated husband, Shashi is alarmed to realize that overnight, she has lost her life's moorings.
Meanwhile, their fiercely independent daughter Tara, a Sanskrit scholar, has been drawn into a passionate involvement with an older man, which threatens to consume her in ways she did not imagine possible.
Amidst a rising tide of religious fundamentalism in India that is determined to put women in their place, Shashi and Tara attempt to look at themselves, and at each other, in a new light. But is it possible to emerge from an eclipse unscathed?
An astonishing feat of the imagination, The Illuminated is as sophisticated in the quality of its prose as it is provocative in its thematic focus on questions of identity. A remarkable novel of ideas, it marks the arrival of a tremendous new literary talent.
'Lyrical throughout yet so deceptively easygoing, The Illuminated is an extraordinary novel' Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name
'An incisive portrayal of the abusve and exploitation that thrives as duty, perhaps even attraction, in relationships' Shubhangi Swarup
'A novel of such self-assurance one can scarcely believe it is the author's first' Shanta Gokhale
'Sad and funny and wise, The Illuminated is one of those books that will make you hug your loved ones tight' Akhil Sharma
Author
About Anindita Ghose
Anindita Ghose is a writer and journalist based in Mumbai. She was previously the Editor of the Saturday magazine Mint Lounge and the Features Director of Vogue India. She completed her MA in Linguistics and Semiotics from the University of Mumbai and has an MA in Arts & Culture Journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York. In 2019, she was a Hawthornden Writing Fellow. The Illuminated is her first novel.
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