Everything the light touches A novel

Pariat (The Nine-Chambered Heart) weaves the stories of two women's travels in India with a narrative involving German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in her lush and layered latest. Shai returns from contemporary Delhi to her hometown in India's mountainous Meghalaya region. There, she's stunned to learn Oiñ, her childhood nanny, is gravely ill, and she strikes out for the remote village of Mawmalang to check in on her. In a parallel narrative set in the early 1900s, Cambridge University graduate student Evelyn travels to Calcutta under the guise of searching for a suitor while surreptitiously visiting botanical gardens and wandering the forests of northeastern India. Evelyn eventually connects with a young would-be suitor, but she's more interested in her search for a rare plant, which leads her to take a solo hike deep in the forest. Goethe, who was also a botanist, comes into play while making a 1780s sojourn to Italy as part of a natural philosophy project, where he develops the ideas that will prove deeply influential to Evelyn. Shai, meanwhile, discovers her green thumb while visiting with Oiñ's family. There's an abundance of lush details of northeastern India, and the smooth synthesis of ideas and narrative keeps everything together. This is a feast. Agent: Maria Cardona, Pontas Literary & Film. (Oct.)

Across centuries and continents, this novel explores questions of self-discovery, botany, empire, and the limits of knowledge, with a trace of romance. This novel--the first by Indian writer Pariat to be published in the U.S.--travels between present-day India and 18th-century Europe through the viewpoints of four characters. Shai, a young woman in India, wants to see her sick childhood nanny and so leaves her city life behind for a remote village that has connections to a vanished nomadic past and is currently suffering from the consequences of illegal uranium mining. Evelyn is an eager Cambridge graduate in the 1910s committed to Goethe's botanical writings and his belief in a plant that is a blueprint for all plants. She believes such a plant might exist in India and is cared for by nomads, spurring her to travel into the Lower Himalayas in the waning decades of the British Empire. Goethe is traveling through Italy in the 1780s, pursuing his botanical theories that will result in The Metamorphosis of Plants. Linnaeus is at the center of the book, with a poetical travelogue of his journey to Lapland in 1732. The book asks how we see the world--through an organized system, like how Linnaeus classified the plant world, or through a sense of connection and unity, like how Goethe describes plant life in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It can be hard for the reader to follow the thread between each character and feel satisfied with the space each has been given; Goethe's sections in particular feel like more of a digression and pull away from the more engaging storylines of Shai and Evelyn. Readers interested in historical fiction may want to check this out while noting that not all chapters are equally engaging. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.