The earthspinner A novel

Life as a newly arrived student in England feels unmoored to Sara (Sarayu), especially because her past casts a long shadow. Roy (All the Lives We Never Lived, 2018) interrupts Sara's narrative abroad to recount her childhood in India, forged by guilt. Elango, a Hindu potter who ferries Sara and her sister to school and back, is a family fixture. When Elango adopts Chinna, a dog he can ill afford, Sara's family helps with Chinna's care. But when Elango falls in love with Zohra, a Muslim woman, even Sara's family cannot protect the couple from societal wrath. Sara is convinced she is to blame. Roy's multilayered novel evokes the craft of pottery with a gentle touch while rendering a moving depiction of the power of guilt. When fresh clay is soft enough to hold an impression, it can be transformed. The same applies to Sara. Pivotal childhood moments might unspool at the periphery, but they are strong enough to forge Sara's character forever. "My father would have said change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had," Sara remembers. As she eventually discovers, change can deliver closure, but not without a trace of melancholy.

The art of pottery looms large in Roy's latest, a novel of small tragedies (after All the Lives We Never Lived). Narrator Sara, a lonely Indian student on scholarship at a damp English university, seeks solace in a pottery studio in the basement of a local church. It is clear early on, however, that the story belongs to Sara's teacher, Elango, a gifted Hindu potter. Years earlier in India, when Sara was a child there, Elango begins work on a beautiful terra-cotta horse after a vivid dream, and in the meantime has fallen in love with Zohra, the Muslim granddaughter of a blind calligrapher. But Elango's finished work of art, which has been decorated with Urdu poetry written by Zohra's grandfather, causes an explosion of violent religious animosity, and Elango and Zohra are forced to flee to Delhi together, leaving behind a beloved dog named Chinna with Sara's family, thus binding the characters to one another. Roy delivers profound insights on the power of art ("Work with whatever earth you get," Elango tells Sara. "A potter knows how to do that"), the hideous nature of religious intolerance, and perhaps most sadly, the consequences of pursuing a dream. This is Roy's best to date. (July)