Alice Albinia read English Literature at Cambridge University. After graduating, she moved to Delhi, where she worked for the next two a half years as a journalist and editor for the Centre for Science & Environment, Biblio, Outlook Traveller, and several other Indian newspapers and magazines. Her first book, Empires of the Indus won a Royal Society of Literature / Jerwood Foundation Special Prize for non-fiction work in progress, a Somerset Maugham Award and the Dolman Travel Prize. Alice Alibinia lives in UK.
Leela‰ÛÓalluring, taciturn, haunted‰ÛÓis moving back to Delhi from New York. She knows her return will unsettle many lives. Twenty-five years ago her sister was seduced by Vyasa, a young university lecturer. Now Vyasa, an eminent Sanskrit scholar, is preparing for the unlikely marriage of his son, Ash, to the child of a Hindu nationalist. Compounding Leela‰۪s disruptive presence, Vyasa‰۪s hedonistic daughter Bharati arrives from London, reluctantly leaving her cosmopolitan university life to see Ash married. He, meanwhile, has fallen in love with his brother-in-law to be.
Gleefully presiding over the drama is Ganesh‰ÛÓdivine, elephant-headed scribe of India‰۪s great epic, the Mahabharata. The family patriarchs may think they have arranged the wedding for their own selfish ends, but according to Ganesh it is he who is directing events‰ÛÓin a bid to save Leela, his beloved heroine, from his devious enemy Vyasa.
Turning to fiction after an award-winning travel book, Alice Albinia has written a brilliantly playful and genre-defying first novel. Ambitious and entertaining, Leela‰۪s Book weaves a tale of contemporary Delhi that crosses religious and social boundaries, reaching back into the origins of the Mahabharata itself.
