Vikram Chandra’s debut novel

won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Published Book. The novel is a Scheherazadian epic cascading through multiple levels of storytelling, Hindu gods, an American road trip, battles, magic realism, and series of intimate encounters and engagements with British colonialism, or as Sanjay, the novel’s protagonist, says, “The Big Indian Lie” (17). Split into five books and a before and after, the epic journeys through time weaving anecdotes and reoccurring British and Indian characters through a series of narrators that “forsake grim shortness and hustle” and instead “let us luxuriate in …curlicues” (24). 

The complex narrative is split into five stories: “now” --

2688 words

Citation: Doty, Robyn. "Red Earth and Pouring Rain". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 August 2018 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2436, accessed 23 November 2024.]