It has taken me a long time to write a review for LATITUDES, but in the end, I don't think I'll ever find the correct words to sum up how Shubhangi Swarup made me feel. 

'Lyrical' is the understatement of the century. Every word sings, so the sensation of reading is more akin to listening to a song. This world is a strange one, with turtles and ghosts and yetis, oceans and women and wars, yet it all feels undeniably true. It is magic and it is life, and beyond that, I really can't explain. But if you're a lover of literary fiction in any form, you *must* give this one a go. 

I look forward to whatever adventure Swarup decides to take us on next. 5/5.

Lyrical and intensely written, these four interconnected stories are ambitious in scope and delivery. Swarup has a unique way with prose, deftly capturing sentiments such as “Life is more than the sum of its breaths and terrors.” The stories are complex and multilayered, taking us across the Indian subcontinent - but I felt the novel lost its way towards the latter half of the book, not entirely sustaining my interest. A solid debut with room for the author to grow and develop her craft. 3.5*

I love magical realism. I loved the whimsy and subtle humor tied into each sentence here. I just wish the story itself had hit me more strongly, and I can’t even pinpoint what it was about this one that didn’t totally hit the mark for me. Normally multiple POVs work for me, but I think with this one I was left feeling distanced from the characters and that can make or break a book for me personally. It was good, I just didn’t fall in love with this one.

This is such a beautifully written story and I look forward to reading more from the author in the future. It’s a book to savor rather than rush through.

An astonishing debut. This is a beautifully expansive book that details the complicated connections between humans and nature, while also bringing history to life and following characters that are easy to fall in love with. Swarup’s style has the lyricism of an ancient wisdom, of which I was constantly in awe, and the power of an earthquake, which could be overwhelming at times. I can certainly see myself returning to this book in the future, either to read a section or the whole thing again. 

Thanks to NetGalley and One World for the ARC.

This book was lyrical and thoughtful all at once, spanning generations and stories that explore what it means to love another. I enjoyed each of the stories, though the first one was my favorite. While the book as a whole was a bit of a slow read, I was enamored by the ambience and each of the characters. I would absolutely recommend this book for anyone looking for a slightly different take on a book about love. It’s not a romance book; it’s an exploration and discussion of love.

I struggled to get into this book. It covered a range of topics that I found hard to connect. There were points I got so bogged down into details where I lost the plot. I loved the richness of the culture, but there was something missing for me.

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile. 

Some beautiful prose, Summer, whip, thrum and slip. The sun is dead, they tell you.
Seeded in the sounds is an elemental silence. The quietness of mist and the stillness of ice.

Latitudes of Longing features several interconnected stories spanning time and geography. I'm quite impressed with its scope. The first portion set in the Andaman Islands (where the environs itself features strongly) reminds me of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide.  Both featured an off the beaten path location, the gorgeous prose evoked the soul of the place and years of painstaking research went into the writing.

Shubhangi Swarup dips into the fields of topography, geology, botany, animal biology, evolution and orogenesis in crafting this incredible work. Yet the resulting writing is not dry at all but evokes wonder at the diversity and journey of our planet. At times, it reads like a meditative piece on the origin and resting place of land, emerging from tectonic forces pushing up the sea beds eventually being resorbed. Although she didn't feature Galapagos Islands as one of the places, it frequently came to mind as it's where active volcanic islands continue to form conveyer belt style and of course the endemic species of flora and fauna evolved uniquely adapted to conditions on each island.

The love stories are touching too, like the husband wife relationship between Giriji Prasad and Chandra Devi.  I chuckled at Chandra Devi's feminist replies to an Indian MIL who wanted a male grandson as well as her musings of Mary in the role of her namesake in the Christian origin belief.

This wide ranging work also brings to mind a BBC nature documentary where far ranging corners of the world are explored. Here we journey from India ( Calcutta, Andaman) to Burma to Nepal, the Karakoram Mountains.  The prose is poetic and evocative.  Because the author obviously so much care with crafting this work, I found myself reading with full concentration absorbed. 

It's hard to believe this is a debut work. Incredible.  

Thanks to One World and Netgalley for an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup is a beautiful and poignant book. It's no wonder it won prizes in India. The book is divided into four sections: Islands, Faultline, Valley, and Snow Desert. All four and interconnected, yet distinct. Islands was my favorite of the group - chronicling the story of a new marriage. 

It's hard to do this book justice. It's lyrical and imbued with magical realism. It's a love letter to the earth as much as to the characters. It's undoubtedly ambitious, and that ambition threatens the narrative of the book at times, but the book must still be applauded for the risks Swarup took. 

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

Shubhangi Swarup's debut novel Latitudes of Longing is a gorgeously written set of four loosely interlinked novellas, all concerned with the ways in which we humans connect to our planet. Starting with Islands, and moving on to Faultline, Valley, and Snow Desert, each section focuses on a character or couple and explores their relationships with each other and with the terrain. We spend time with couple in the first section, Gijira Prasad and Chanda Devi in the Islands, and then the story moves to the Faultline via their maid, Mary, who travels to Burma to find her son who is a political prisoner. In Burma we then meet the son's best friend, Thapa. Thapa's story is told in. Valley, and then his smuggling career leads us to a distant village in Snow Desert, where we hear a tale of love in old age. 
While I enjoyed the relaying of the tales - and LOVED the lush writing about the natural world, the themes and story line didn't carry all the way through, and the ending fell a little flat for me. Latitudes of Longing is, however, one of my favorite reads this year, and I still laugh at the thought of a ghost billy goat. Worth a read for the descriptions of the islands alone.

I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book from the publisher, One World, an imprint of Random House, through NetGalley.  Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.  

Obviously, with the rating, I didn’t care for the book.  The plot of the book is hard to follow.  The book dives deep into a plethora of topics:  nature (trees, plants, animals), people (nomads), religion (Hinduism, Buddhists, Muslims), gods, geography, weather (blizzards, monsoons), earthquakes/tsunami, gems, fossils, astronomy, military, spirits, and life/death.  There is so much detail in many of these areas that I tended to skim these sections.  

The book provides significant information about the culture, including food, clothing, arranged marriages, of people in primarily in India and the Andaman Islands.  The story includes geography and/or history of numerous countries:  India, Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, China, Tibet.  Basically, many countries in this region of the world is touched upon.  

I stuck with the book to the end hoping it would be tied together at the conclusion.  Unfortunately, it didn’t hit home with me.

At one point in Shubhangi Swarup’s novel “Latitudes of Longing,” Thapa asks his friend Plato how stories are written.

“Change,” Plato answers. “Something needs to happen. Without it, a story is dead.”

“Latitudes of Longing,” a sweeping and poetic debut, is about change — like how a supercontinent broke off into many tinier islands and continents, how the moon gave birth to the stars, how a mother abandoned her son, and how a man who studies trees married a woman who talked to them.

The latter story is how this novel begins. Newlyweds Girija Prasad Varma and Chanda Devi are the man and woman of this tale. Girija Prasad is a scientist who landed a post as a researcher on the Andaman Islands, a formerly British, now Indian settlement; Chanda is a clairvoyant, who talks to the platonic ghosts and ghosts of goats on their new island home.

The Varmas’ tale is told in “Islands,” the first part in Swarup’s four-part novel. Their tale is the “Pangaea” (Girija Prasad spends his life studying the phenomenon) of this book — the longest and earliest story from which the other interconnected and shorter stories break apart from.

The first piece to break off of Girija Prasad Varma and Chanda Devi’s island is Mary, a Karen woman from a faultline in Myanmar. She works as the Varmas’ maid, raising their one and only daughter, Devi. However, Mary leaves the Indian islands to return to Sagaing after her son’s friend Thapa visits to tell her that her estranged son, Plato, has been imprisoned for organizing protests. Mary and Plato’s story of reconciliation, love, sacrifice and redemption is told in “Faultline,” the second segment of Swarup’s book.

Years after Thapa arranges for Plato and Mary’s reunion, Thapa returns to his home in the valley of Thamel. This is where he, a man nearing 60, meets Bagmati, a bar dancer young enough to be his granddaughter. In “Valley” — a reverse retelling of “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights” — a girl with nothing to live for threatens a man with her personal execution if he cannot tell her a story, something that brings her out of her life in a valley of despair. That’s why Thapa, a smuggler by trade, seeks his friend Plato for advice. And that’s how the son of the sun and the daughter of a rain goddess came to live in a snow desert.

“Snow Desert” is “Latitudes of Longing’s” final destination, the fourth tale in this collection. Changthang, the snow desert in Tibet, is a where octogenarians Tashi Yeshe and Ghazala Mumtax Abdul Sheikh Begum fall in love. It’s also where Girija Rana meets the ghost of his grandfather, a man who was once married to a woman who could see ghosts.

In these four stories framed by their geographical names and elements, Swarup beautifully explains why the moon waxes and wanes, why one man became a vegetarian, and how all stories are formed, one on top of another.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “Latitudes of Longing” from NetGalley and One World in exchange for this honest review.

The four stories in this book are loosely connected. Swarup’s powerful command of words makes this not only an interesting story of people, but it is a beautiful travelogue of India. The novellas show how people connect, or do not connect to their natural surroundings. I found the first story the most captivating for me, but they are all good. The debut authors are setting the bar exceedingly high for those who follow them.

At fourteen years old I was assigned Paolo Coelho’s landmark novel The Alchemist for summer reading. I threw it on my bed in disgust, barely able to finish the slim volume. To my literal mind it read like nothing more than vague, repetitive abstractions, amounting to almost nothing in the end. Today, over ten years later, I’ve considered picking it up again. To see if I’m stirred by the magic, as I was upon reading Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup.

Like The Alchemist, it is a love story of epic proportions, in which the earth is not merely setting but a protagonist, with its own soul and spirit. But rather than focusing on a single story, Latitudes of Longing unfurls into a book of fairy tales, stories woven together by a few recurring characters and a pervasive prose style.

The first instinct to describe this book is to rattle off its list of characters and settings. A scholar and his prophetic wife, ghosts of every nationality, a political prisoner and his villager mother, a smuggler, a pair of aging grandparents, a gecko trapped in amber, a dancer, a researcher, a turtle. We’re swept away to the Andaman islands, Myanmar, Nepal, Antarctica, even into the depths of the ocean. The plot of this novel is how these elements coalesce. Swarup divides the novel into sections, each featuring a handful of characters, exploring their pasts, presents, and human relationships  in amazing detail. Yet the characters float through different sections, forgotten for a while only to surface without warning. The book reads at times as a set of loosely connected stories, and other times as a vast mythos, never hiding from us the effects that time and distance can have.

Swarup’s prose is both the novel’s highlight and what holds it back. On the plus side, there is no sensory detail or wisp of an idea that goes unexplored. Fully fleshed out are the movements of water, passage of time, presence of the mountains, and transfer of one life to another:

“The collision also created rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds. But the amber predated them by an epoch. Trapped within it, the gecko bore witness to one of the most violent events in prehistory. An event that pulverized, hacked, crumbled, slit, and ultimately transfigured the landscape into the unimaginable. No land or ocean was spared the escaping cracks that grew with a life of their own. Flung from great heights to great depths by tectonic transgressions and regressions, it never once opened its eyes. The amber lay in a valley of faults.”

However, while this prose is spellbinding in small doses, it results in fatigue. Unlike The Alchemist, which is very much a novella, Latitudes of Longing is far lengthier. The novel reaches its emotional balance in “Islands,” the first section, telling the love story of a British-educated Indian scholar, living with his homespun wife in the Andaman islands. Theirs is a marriage of equals, as passersby are shocked to realize, and their love story is a slow, satisfying burn that dwarfs every other relationship in the novel. Its placement as the first section of the novel may also have something to do with my preference for it. The narrative can feel weighed down by heavy, detailed prose, as well as deep introspection by each and every character. Additionally, the novel has few moments of levity, and can go many pages without dialogue. The dialogues featured are often philosophical musings on the movements of the world. The characters sometimes laugh, but we don’t often feel laughter. Moments of happiness are few and ephemeral, with the characters’ moods constantly changing like the planet itself.

I found myself recovering by the final section, “Snow Desert,” with its focus on another tender love story, this time between two aging people in a Nepalese village. They come to grips with mortality, losing both themselves and a greater way of life. I feel the fatigue lessening, now that we are no longer trapped in a prison camp, an abusive marriage, or a seedy dance club. 

In short, this is a novel I recommend in small, incremental pieces. To read it all at once may feel like a weight on your shoulders.

Nevertheless, I read Latitudes of Longing with a greater awareness that I did not have at fourteen. That is to say, an understanding that my tastes now do not dictate my tastes in the future. I’m willing to revisit The Alchemist with newfound appreciation after ten years. I imagine my appreciation for Latitudes of Longing may abound as well, in hopefully less time.

This is not my typical genre and wanted to branch out a little. I found it very difficult to read and at times difficult to understand. I would have preferred to stick with one set of characters and build a better understanding of them.

This is a really difficult book to review! I can't really describe the plot other than to say it follows different characters -- who all have light connections to each other -- all over India. The true protagonist of this book, though, is nature, which is described with incredible beauty and elegance as we are transported to different climates. The prose is so lyrical, I often had to stop and make sure I was following what was happening. I would put this in the category of literary fiction that is not the easiest to read but is worth the work. On the plus side, this forced me to read it more slowly which drew out the enjoyment. I highly recommend this book, but go into it knowing that it's a quite unique writing style that may take some getting used to!

A poetic meditation on the human need for intimacy. Prose as smooth as sea-buffed amber. Let yourself be swept from a tropical island to city, village and the to crevasses of Everest; and savour the majesty of Swarup’s vision.

A gorgeous love letter to language and the natural world. Very descriptive and not always easy to read. I found myself re-reading many pages, but though the journey was slow, it was beautiful. The story begins in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, travels through Myanmar, India and Nepal, and ends at the Pakistan border, all the while evoking the natural wonder of the region. Overall a gorgeous novel.

Thank you Penguin Random House, One World and Net Galley for my e-copy of Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup. I began reading this and was quickly impressed with the lyrical, gorgeously written prose provided. As I continued reading, I slowly became uninterested and quite frankly confused by what was happening, where this novel was going and what it was trying to say. Sadly, I did not finish this novel. I know someone else will definitely enjoy it, especially the author’s beautiful writing style, but it wasn’t for me.