Tuesday 28 July 2009 at 7 pm

Prakriti Foundation in association with Penguin Books India and Madras Book Club present the publication of

FUGITIVE HISTORIES
by Githa Hariharan

Venue: Taj Connemara
Binny Road, Chennai 600 002

Ranvir Shah will introduce and be in conversation with the author

'An outstanding writer' - J.M. Coetzee
'Hariharan writes with anguish, pain and anger about what is happening to our country' - Khushwant Singh

Sifting through sketches left behind by her late husband Asad, Mala summons ghosts from her childhood, relives the heady days of love and optimism when Asad and she robustly defied social conventions to build a life together - and struggles to understand how events far removed could so easily snatch away the certainties they had always taken for granted.

As their story unfolds, others emerge: Of Sara, Mala and Asad's daughter, of Yasmin, whom Sara meets across a lately created ‘border', and of innumerable other lives trapped in limbo - some caught in a mesh of memory, anguish and hate, others seeking release in private dreams and valiant hopes.

Marked by an astonishing clarity of observation and deep compassion, Fugitive Histories exposes the legacy of prejudice that, sometimes insidiously, sometimes perceptibly, continues to affect disparate lives in present-day India. In prose that is at once elegant, playful and startlingly inventive, Githa Hariharan portrays with remarkable precision the web of human connections that binds as much as it
divides.

About the author
Githa Hariharan was born in Coimbatore and grew up in Bombay and Manila. She now lives in New Delhi. Hariharan's first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. Her work since then includes the short story collection The Art of Dying, and the novels The Ghosts of Vasu Master, When Dreams Travel and In Times of Siege.
For more information on the author and her work visit www.githahariharan.com