India, July 18 -- All stories begin with a river and end with one. In Jeet Thayil's The Elsewhereans, the river is memory - meandering, deceptive and deeply absorbing. The novel moves not in a straight line but in ripples, carrying fragments of lives scattered across time, borders and belief. Thayil has never followed conventional form. Here, he blends fiction with memoir, inserts ghost stories alongside family sagas and lets images breathe in the margins. It reads like a confession and an archive at once.
From Kerala's backwaters to the streets of Bombay, Paris and Addis Ababa, it is less a journey of characters and more of moods and memory. Despite its wide canvas, there is intimacy. This is a rare book where food is described with the s...