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Goldsboro Books

Leela's Book

Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

Publisher Harvill Secker

Genre: General Fiction

Released:

  • Signed by the Author
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • Hardcover

£50.00
£50.00
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  • Book Condition & Notes

    All of our books that a have dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

About the book

Leela - alluring, taciturn, haunted - is moving back to Delhi from New York. She knows her return will unsettle precariously balanced lives. Twenty-two years ago her sister was seduced by Vyasa, a young university lecturer. Now an eminent Sanskrit scholar, Vyasa is preparing for the unlikely marriage of his son, Ash, to the child of a Hindu nationalist. Compounding Leela's disruptive presence, Ash's hedonistic twin sister Bharati arrives from London, reluctantly leaving her cosmopolitan university life to see Ash married. Ash, meanwhile, has fallen in love with his brother-in-law to be.

Gleefully presiding over the drama is Ganesh - divine, 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 - in 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.

About the Author

Alice Albinia

Alice Albinia is an award-winning author of conjoined works of fiction and nonfiction.


Her first book, Empires of the Indus: the story of a river (John Murray, 2008), describes a riverine journey through time and place: from Karachi on the shores of the Arabian Sea, north through Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, to the slopes of Mount Kailash in Tibet.


The book won six awards, including a Somerset Maugham award and a Dolman prize. Her first novel, Leela’s Book (Harvill Secker, 2011), is a retelling, set in modern Delhi, of how the Mahabharata, India’s ancient Sanskrit epic, came to be written down on that same Tibetan mountain. It was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club best first novel award and long-listed for the DSC prize for South Asian Literature.

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