‘In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman’– so begins the story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, who is driven to rebel against tradition and follow her artist\s instinct for freedom. Freedom of a different kinds is in the air across India. The fight against British rule is reaching a critical turn. The Nazis have come to power in Germany. At this point of crisis, two strangers arrive in Gayatri’s town, opening up to her the vision of other possible lives. What took Myshkin’s mother from India to Dutch-held Bali in the 1930s, ripping a knife through his comfortingly familiar universe? Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, Myshkin comes to understand the connections between the anguish at home and a war-torn universe overtaken by patriotism. Roy’s deeply moving novel tells the story of men and women trapped in a dangerous era uncannily similar to the present.