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.

This is a very ambitious debut novel with a lot of themes and narratives. It's not that they're confusing but that they're distracting. Meaning, they don't allow us, as readers, to dwell on the key themes, moods, emotions, and ideas long enough for meaning or impact. My overall impression is that this is at least two or three separate novels stitched together somehow. The writing gets over-wrought in places and then sparse in others so there's a lack of consistency in style and voice as well. I was really hoping to be able to review this book properly but I could barely finish it. My sincere apologies.

Thank you to Netgalley and One World Books for the opportunity to review this eARC.
Wow. This book slowly works its way into your heart, to an extent I didn't realize until the very last sentence when I was immobilized, staring at the page thinking, that was a perfect ending.

I requested it because the reviews and description conjured faraway, rural, beautiful places that I've never visited.

Set in four different places that I know very little about, I spent a lot of time closing the book and perusing Google Maps to explore the setting. Andaman Islands, Burma (at the time), Thamel (Kathmandu), and Kashmir.

There are four different sections of the novel, all gently related until the end when it closes the circle in an extremely satisfying and magical way.

Each setting is geologically related as well - which the author reminded me of with her poetic mentions of underwater subduction zones, mountain peaks, faultlines, rivers, and deserts that all undergo transformations.

This is a very slow read, and in the beginning I wondered if I was going to make it through. So many times I'd have to go back and re-read a paragraph to grasp the poetry. It jumps from the characters' lives to dreams to evolution over millenia all in a few sentences. But I hung in there and just read a few chapters a night so I could go slowly.

After the first section, which is almost half of the book, I got into the groove of the weird and beautiful writing. It seemed to go faster and faster after that.

Besides themes of geology and evolution, this story brought in dreams, love, ghosts, reincarnation, war, political prisoners, drug smuggling, dancers, blood apricots, a yeti (cheema), glaciers, and more. The ideas of a place and a people surviving while governments fought over their land, and of a place being fundamentally changed forever by the shifting of the earth, are explored.

An interesting story, amazing descriptions, and lovely poetic writing tie this book together. The more I think about it the more I like the book!

This. novel comprises four loosely connected novellas. Set in different regions of India, it's very much for fans of nature writing. The human characters are less interesting, as are their stories, than the descriptions of flora and fauna. I learned a great deal about the geography of the subcontinent. The writing is lush, albeit a tad purple at times. This is one best read, I think as one would approach a short story collection-one at a time. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of world literature and literary fiction,

Latitudes of Longing is full of luscious language and vivid imagery. It contains four sections - Islands, Faultline, Valley and Snow Desert. We visit the Andamans, Burma (Myanmar), Nepal and we even meet a yeti in no man’s land, the area between India and Pakistan. The characters are secondary to the geography they live in. The book begins with the strongest, most memorable section, in my opinion. The book began to feel a little bogged down and a little repetitive as it went along. I think a lot of people that like nature writing will really love this book as it reads like a love letter to land and sea. The language is stunning and prize-worthy. Some of my favorite passages below.

"But faith is not the birthright of the pious. A virus does not need Jesus Christ to understand the value of adaptation and survival."

"Belief, it turns out, is belief of its own kind. It is a river that flows against the overbearing currents of time and truth to make the opposite journey. It gathers all the mysteries of the ocean and returns them to their frozen origins. In the form of a glacier, it holds its head high up to look at god hiding behind the mists of heaven. What is the purpose of belief if even god can’t put the world back the way you worshipped it?"

"That is art’s biggest tragedy. We can imagine god, god’s enemies, ideologies to fight over, but we can’t tell a single story of which we are not the center. That is the root of all the world’s problems, my friend. But you cannot put yourself in someone else’s shoes until you remove your own."

"Standing alone in the face of infinity, it’s not your beliefs but what you have rejected that bothers you.."

Early in Shubhangi Swarup’s novel Latitudes of Longing, an earthquake strikes the Andamans, a tiny ocean archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. In an instant, “the islands tilted by a few meters, drowning forests and farms.” But although Latitudes considers the sliver of time immediately following disaster, Swarup is more interested in the shockwaves it sends through subsequent generations. “Children born in the aftermath would dismiss their parents’ stories and ancestral myths as tall tales born from the imagination of fools—the same fools who built a lighthouse in one and a half meters of water and went fishing on dry land,” he writes. “The gap between generations would turn into a gulf between people who inhabited different maps.”

In the midst of a pandemic, I am seismically attuned to disaster. It is liberating, even joyful, to experience the world of Latitudes of Longing, perhaps especially when it does somersaults. I feel the way Victorians might have, reading a ship captain’s diary and imagining myself salt-stung and free. Latitudes is a reminder that the earth itself is alive, and that even in our isolation, we are members of a changing world. In the timescale of this novel, bedrock itself moves, lighthouses are unmoored, and you can feel the ground wandering.

This debut novel, a series of four connected stories, Islands, Faultline, Valley, and Snow Desert, was originally published in India in 2018, and takes the reader on a journey through South Asia and through time.

5 Stars
Islands tells the story of a newly married couple, Giriji Prasad and Chanda Devi living on a tropical island, where silence is the relentless sound of water. The waves, like your own breaths, never leave you. For a fortnight now, the gurgle and thunder of clouds has drowned out the waves. Rains drum on the roof and skid over the edge, losing themselves in splashes. Simmer, whip, thrum, and slip. The sun is dead they tell you.’

As newlyweds, they are but ’strangers in a bedroom damp with desire and flooded with incipient dreams. And Girija Prasad dreams furiously these days. For the rains are conducive to fantasies, an unscientific truth.’

For me, this was the most engaging of these stories, but I enjoyed them all, even though their appeal varied. I loved the setting of this somewhat isolated Andaman Islands under the British Empire, and Chanda’s character, she communes with the trees, with as well as with spirits, whereas Girja is more technical and scientific, having received an Oxford education.

4 Stars
Faultline follows the life of Girija’ and Chanda’s maid, Mary, as well as her son, who goes by Plato rather than his given name. Plato is in a Burmese prison, a political prisoner.
’He crawls to a corner and sits with his back against the damp wall, weeping with drops of humidity…Current, that’s all he is. Passing through different bodies and lives.’


3 Stars
Valley follows Thapa, a friend of Mary’s son, who is from Nepal, and who meets a very young dancer at a bar in Kathmandu. He is closer to sixty, and she is ’…young enough to be his granddaughter.’

’What the rest of the world consumes as breath is, in this land, a musical instrument. The mountains use the air to hum, drum, howl, and sing. They use the air to connect your soul to their own. For once you have breathed in the mountain air, there is no turning back. No matter where you live out your story, the outcome will have been decided by the mountains.’

3 Stars
Snow Desert, is set in the Karakoram Mountains, in a remote village, and follows the story of Apo, the ’Grandfather of the entire village, a man who ’feels that…the past is real and the present is a half-baked memory Sometimes, the past is an incomprehensible beast and the future its unrealized shadow. He spends his time trying to preserve, share the myths, legends.

While these stories, particularly the last two, seemed to echo, repeat similar themes, a dose of magical realism, and the lovely writing throughout made this more than a worthwhile read for me.


Pub Date: 19 May 2020


Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House Publishing Group – Random House / One World

"The entire island rises up to the occasion. The birds, insects, trees, waves, and the setting sun all play their part in a larger symphony, orchestrated by the fingers in communion."

This book has four sections that seem not connected at first glimpse but are connected by a thread that goes across the characters so each one has a character from the previous connecting them even as they go back and forth in time.

“Death …” Chanda Devi reflects on the word as cicadas, frogs, and flies intervene. “Ghosts do not live where they died. They return to the place where they felt the most alive. They have struggled, lived, and enjoyed their time there so much, they cannot let go.”

My favorite by a large margin was the first story. Chanda was one of my favorite characters and the bits of magical language mixed in with the magical realism made me fall in love with the location, the characters, the love, the writing. All of it. She was the most vivid character in the whole story, for me.

“Yes,” she agreed with him. “Perhaps that’s how time is for some of us. It doesn’t fly. It sits still.”

The second story about a boy and a mom who are long lost to each other was heartbreaking. That evocative writing is uplifting when applied to love and devastating when applied to torture and imprisonment. It was hard to read the story. In fact, both the mom and the son's stories were really hard to read.

“The best stories are the ones that are still to come, Ghazala. Close enough to hear, smell, and admire. Yet out of reach.”

By the end of the book, I was less connected than I was in the beginning. Even though I loved the imagery in every story and the writing never lost its power, none of the other characters took my breath away the way Chanda did.

“And then you went on to say the most beautiful thing I have heard. ‘It’s love,’ you told me. ‘Faces change and are misleading. Sometimes you may not recognize who the person really is. But love is love. So long as you feel it, give it, and receive it, it is enough. It connects you to everyone and everything.’ ”

All in all, the lyrical language and imagery in this book will stay with me for a very long time.

with gratitude to netgalley and Random House for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I really, really wanted to like this book more than I did. The characters were fascinating, but the pace was just too slow to keep me engaged.

The imagery in this book is among the beautiful I have ever read in a novel. The author did a really great job of weaving together the characters with each other and with nature. Each section of the book was like its own story while also building upon the previous ones. It also touched upon some Indian history with which I was unfamiliar. I usually steer clear of any novels with any fantasy elements, but I did not find that the presence of fantasy overwhelmed me. I really enjoyed this book and hope others do as well.

Latitudes of Longing reads like a love letter to South Asia and its people. The novel is broken into four distinct stories, each one loosely connected to the others.

This novel is clearly a work of the heart. The writing is lush and atmospheric, and, wow, it took me to South Asia. I was longing to experience a new culture after reading this novel. Swarup’s obviously intensive research shone in Latitudes of Longing. I learned more than I could imagine from this work of fiction.

Latitudes of Longing was not, however, what I expected. While the writing was vaguely beautiful, I was frequently lost in the metaphors and found the writing too lyrical to be digestible for the average audience. I felt like I only understood glimpse of the story because I was often trying to decipher what the sentences meant.

Swarup created something new and beautiful, but it was somewhat lost on me. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the gifted galley in exchange for my opinion.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC of the book.

I believe the only word that captures the essence of the book, and the one you are most likely to see in the reviews, is "lyrical". The book takes you to Andaman islands, Burma, Nepal and a no-man's land in the mountains between India and Pakistan. Very descriptive, very beautiful narrative.

The book is divided into 4 loosely connected sections. A minor character in one section becomes a major character in the next with bunch of small vignettes about some other minor characters (animate or inanimate) strewn about. It is more of 4 novellas rather than one novel.

This is one of those books where the journey is the reward as there is no real destination. Which is where my beef is. Since the book meanders through 4 lives, there is no overarching plot keeping the book together. Would I have rated it differently if it had, say, just the first 3 sections? Probably not.

Though the book starts to become a little too abstract with each section, it is very clear that the author is very talented. While I savored each sentence in the first section, the latter ones had me skimming through some sentences. Got tiring after a bit.

Since the threads are loosely connected, you feel that the book ended because the author ran out of ideas or because the editors wanted to limit the length of the book. Such a book can easily be five times the sections without impacting the outcome. Either way, it is a book that fulfills you and leaves you unfulfilled at the same time.

Interesting, nicely written book, but was not what I was looking for for my book subscription.box. Just not for me.

We following many characters in this book but that being said none of them are dull. Each has their own longing and story to tell. Beautifully written and enthralling.

Thanks to Random House One World, via NetGalley, for this advance reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.

The settings of the Andaman Islands, Burma, Kathmandu, and the Karakoram Mountains immediately ticked off my boxes.  These four interlinked stories are beautifully written, richly imagined, and intricately plotted.  Overwhelmingly, the book has a mood that evokes faraway tales, deep emotions, warm recognition, and breathless awe. The first story, about 40% of the book, is the most affecting.  All four are completely wondrous in their intensity; the writing is dense with story, poetry and imagery.  The first is about a couple, a scientist (a geologist who contemplates Pangea) and his wife who sees ghosts and communicates with trees.  The second features their maid's son, a bright-eyed revolutionary. The third is about the son's friend, a smuggler with a heart of gold, and then the fourth tells of an 80-something year old man, who the smuggler meets, who can predict earthquakes, and who woos and falls in love with a 70 year old "witch."  In the four stories are more thought-provoking characters, stories within stories, adventure and reflection, and glimpses of mundane everyday life bursting with meaning or heart.

I surprised myself by re-reading the book.  I had not intended to.  I was only going to search for some information but soon found myself gladly reading the entirety of the book and just marveling at the author's craft.  I got to re-experience the ride and also discover details I'd glossed over initially.  And just as often, I saw how various pieces fit together or prepared the ground for the reading journey.  I sigh with this feeling, a sense that I could just as easily read it a third time now as I recount my first two times.

I would gladly read her future works...each and every one!

Several favorite quotes:

   Silence on a tropical island is the relentless sound of water. The waves, like your own breaths, never leave you...  

...Their world was a giant island held together by mammoth creepers, not gravity.

...Exposed claw-like roots crept upon the ground like pale pythons. He could feel them inch toward him and halt at his toes. Standing there, Girija Prasad felt like an ant, shuffling around, tempted by the impossible.

"Standing alone in the face of infinity, it's not your beliefs but what you have rejected that bothers you."

...Islands, intuitively speaking, made the perfect canvas for practicing the art of nomenclature. The heightened isolation would cause species to become endemic, sooner or later, demanding a unique name. The only exceptions to the rule were the British themselves. They had broken most laws of nature by leaving their island to multiply on others without losing any of their original characteristics--only their marbles.

...Sitting in this garden, watching a hibiscus sun set over an emerald-green archipelago, leaves the couple unsettled. It forces them to swim in the solitary world of thoughts, preoccupations, and visions. Yet it doesn't feel lonely.

   It is on this bombed-out speck that Chanda Devi confronts some of the palest ghosts of her life, waltzing unhindered through their daily rituals. Unlike the intrusive ghosts of Goodenough Bungalow, the ones here are too proud to acknowledge her presence, giving her the luxury of watching them, wide-eyed, for hours. It isn't the passage of time that they document but the exact opposite. They have practiced their routine for decades, defying events like death and India's independence. They have even learned to ignore the ghosts of the present--the living.

...It didn't matter if his eyes were open or closed, lucid visions rose before him. The constellations came swirling down from the absolute darkness of space into the twilit skies. The Poet witnessed the river of stars flood into the prison's passage, dissolving chains and fetters with its brilliance. He saw the constellations reimagine themselves to fit the emptiness within. The stars lived and breathed inside him. They replaced the cells within and without. For it was him they sought.

... He wanted to translate the Poet's work into English   
"Of what use are a dead man's poems to this world? the Poet asked.   
"None. Which is why I can translate them freely."

...Hidden among the cluck and hiss, the croak and chatter outside the window, are the songs of the extinct. The epic of evolution, told by bards long gone. Oh, to abandon the labyrinthine shell and shed old skin. To be naked and vulnerable. Free to swim, sprint, and fly without inhibition. To vanish without a trace only to reappear as a mating call, the way the sun sets in the west and rises in the east...Can their stories and songs be heard by the living? they wonder. Do they acknowledge their legacy in the fossils?

   Disbelief, turns out, is belief of its own kind. It is a river that flows against the overbearing currents of time and truth to make the opposite journey. It gathers all the mysteries of the ocean and returns them to the frozen origins. In the form of a glacier, it holds its head high up to look at god hiding behind the mists of heaven.

..."The world under water is an undocumented map of the world over water," he often tells her. "To solely inhabit the land limits our understanding. All terrains and forms of life, all the cycles of nature and emotions found on land, increase manifold in water."

...Fitted within her contours was a universe entirely different yet linked to his own. Her gaze wasn't otherworldly. It was the other world itself.

...life's biggest irony: What one considered past loves would prove to be life's longest affairs.

...All creation, he is tempted to extrapolate, is a form of self-discovery...