religious extremism brings hurt and violence to a rural village, the consequences of daring to dream against the tide are unleashed. Moving its protagonists between India and Britain, The Earthspinner shows the many ways in which the East encounters the West, fanaticism wars tirelessly against reason, and the individual's creative desires struggle against a populace's basic instinct for destruction. Roy's fifth novel will delight her many faithful readers and is sure to appeal to new audiences. She has delivered a story of immigration, prejudice, art, and love for our era.1c:T514,

A novel that spans India's twentieth century from the 1930s through Independence to the 1990s - by the Man Booker longlisted author of Sleeping on Jupiter

"In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman."

So begins the story of Myshkin and his mother Gayatri, its rebellious, alluring artist-heroine who is driven to abandon home and marriage and follow her primal instinct for freedom.

Freedom of another kind is in the air across all of India, and in Germany the Nazis have come to power. At this point of crisis, a German artist from Gayatri's past seeks her out. His arrival ignites passions she has long been forced to suppress.

What follows is Gayatri's life as pieced together by her son, a journey that takes him through India and Dutch-held Bali. Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, he comes to understand the connections between volcanic strife at home and a war-torn universe overtaken by patriotism.

The scale of Anuradha Roy's novel is matched by its power as a parable for our times. Its depiction of the contrasting ideas of Gandhi and Tagore, of the limits of nationalism when confronted by cosmopolitanism, makes it a spell-binding saga centred on people trying to make sense of their