Everything the Light Touches

In Everything the Light Touches we meet many travellers: Shai, a young Indian woman who journeys to India's northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with indigenous communities, ways of living that realign and renew her. Evelyn, an Edwardian student at Cambridge who, inspired by Goethe's botanical writings, embarks on a journey seeking out the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, botanist and taxonomist, who famously declared "God creates; Linnaeus organizes" and led an expedition to Lapland in 1732. And Goethe himself, who travelled through Italy in the 1780s, formulating his ideas for a revelatory text that called for a re-examination of our propensity to reduce plants - and the world - into immutable parts.

Drawing richly from scientific ideas, the novel plunges into a whirl of ever-expanding themes, and the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban life and the countryside, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and "song and stone." At the heart of the book lies a tussle between different ways of seeing - those that fix and categorize, and those that free and unify.

Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet all is resonance, we discover; all is connection.

"A novel like none other: Janice Pariat brings vividly to life a conception of plants as beings endowed with a powerful inner vitality." - AMITAV GHOSH, author of Gun Island

"A novel of great charm, curiosity and adventure - a passionate call for shaking up the certainties of science and history so as to heed the intuitions and instincts that perhaps only fiction can give voice to." - ANJUM HASAN, author of A Day in the Life: Stories

"Janice Pariat traverses the inherent dignity of life in all its forms and the conflict between doing and being that is alive in all of us. Timely and timeless-a masterpiece and an absolute thrill to read." - AVNI DOSHI, author of Girl in White Cotton (aka Burnt Sugar)

"Ingenious in its nested structure, treading lightly across centuries and species, Everything the Light Touches tackles every subject from the humble leaf to the mighty empire-then proceeds to ask, with Pariat's characteristic wit, if we perhaps haven't got that last bit backwards. An elegant, passionate book (which doubles as a warning) about the impossibility of understanding a single thing about our world without first acknowledging the wonder and mystery inherent in all that surrounds us." -MADHURI VIJAY, author of The Far Field

"Capacious and wise, Everything the Light Touches is a magnificent reminder that the natural world does not lie outside of ourselves, and that when we break trust with the earth, we break our own spirits into scattered fragments. Janice Pariat finds a new language of connection, wonder, and loss, for the songs of the earth from Lapland and Goethe's Europe to the Lower Himalayas and remote villages in India's Northeast, her stories dancing between centuries in this generous and intricate work." -NILANJANA S. ROY, author of The Wildings

"Everything the Light Touches weaves the timelessness of nature and the urgency of human emotions into an elegiac tale that is evocative, intelligent and deeply thought-provoking. A seminal work by a novelist and a poet at the height of her powers." - PRANAY LAL, author of Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent

"Wise, funny, touching, wide-ranging, deep-delving, whip-smart, graceful. Written by a novelist with the eye of a poet, and a poet with the narrative powers of a novelist-a novel that needed to be written, that tells true things, is entirely its own being." - ROBERT MACFARLANE, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

"A dynamic river is certainly better than a static pond. Because still water stagnates, causes stagnation. It is moving water that carries life; it is motion that personifies life. Janice Pariat's Everything the Light Touches is about motion. As we read the novel, we too travel, meet other travellers. It is a book about the contradictions precipitated by time, space and circumstances. A novel that touched me deeply as a whole as well as with its ease of storytelling." - S. HAREESH, author of Moustache

"Written with a curiosity that jumps across geographies, time, discourses and disciplines, Everything the Light Touches is a gift to those who question the forms and preoccupations of the modern novel." -SHUBHANGI SWARUP, author of Latitudes of Longing