What a complicated dynamic with that of India and England. I think the author really encapsulated that struggle while incorporating mythology.

DNF @ 33%
I was completely captivated by the first couple of chapters of this. Couldn't wait to get to the end because I just wanted to devour it. But then it became less interesting to me and the main character became less unique, and by about a third of the way through, even an audiobook couldn't help me maintain interest. I will definitely pick up another Anuradha Roy book in the future, though, because I enjoyed her writing style.

I had never read a book by this author, but now I want to. This was a wonderful story of achieving creative success.

4.5 stars

I am grateful to the publisher HarperVia for sending me an advanced copy of this book for review.

I have never read from this author before, but I will definitely be looking into future works that come from her because the writing in here was exquisite. Not only was the use of language beautiful , but the way in which the story wove together and mimicked the motif of spinning clay that was carried throughout the story was just masterfully done. The author did an amazing job of selecting perspectives, characters, and settings that really enhanced the ideas that were being presented through the experiences of the characters and the stories told within this book.

I feel like as the book went on, we were weaving in and out of different stories, ideas, and lives, studying how interconnected we all are. The way these separate stories converged in the end was beautiful in the same way our character throughout the story worked towards creating this clay horse that he had envisioned and was able to finally create the finished piece. It may be a personal preference, but I do really enjoy when an author takes one passion or interest that characters have or share (pottery in this case) and makes that into a thread that connects every part of this story to the other, creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I really enjoyed this story and I think most of the enjoyment comes from the reading experience itself , because there is much sadness and hardship in this plot. This emotion was emphasized by how tangible these characters were written. Even the settings added to the complex atmosphere of this story, and helped us to share in the characters’ longing, fear, grief, and uncertainty. When I got to the end of the book, I immediately wanted to read it again.

I do not think that explaining more about the plot or going into more detail about the characters would help you to grasp the joy of the reading experience. If you've been interested in this book, I urge you to pick it up. I recommend this book to fans of literary fiction, cultural stories, and beautiful writing.

First published in the UK in 2021; published by HarperVia on July 5, 2022

The Earthspinner is in part a story of forbidden love. More fundamentally, it is a story of creative obsession and prejudice against art that crosses implied boundaries. Elango is a potter, carrying on the tradition of his caste. To make ends meet, he also drives an autorickshaw. His favorite passenger is Zohra, a girl who walks with a limp. Elango falls in love with Zohra but “they belong to tribes that hated each other and he knew they could never be together.” Elango “could not utter what she was, a Muslim. The space between the two was a charnel house of burnt and bloodied human flesh, a giant crack through the earth that was like an open mouth waiting to swallow him.”

Elango dreams of an earthen horse and comes to believe that if he shapes the horse from clay, Zohra will be his. The novel follows Elango as he devotes his free time to creating the horse of his dreams. Zohra’s grandfather, a blind calligrapher, carves into the horse a beautiful poem about riding the freedom of imagination. But Anuradha Roy wants the reader to understand that freedom in India only lives in the imagination. Elango is not free to marry Zohra. Nor is he free to express himself with a horse that does not suit the arbiters of his religion.

Elango’s grandfather once made horses for temples. People who see the horse believe a temple is where it belongs. They do not realize that the poem decorating the horse is written in Urdu, “the language of mullahs,” a desecration of a temple horse — at least in the view of Hindu temple priests.

Elango’s story is narrated by Sara, whose mother is a journalist. As a young girl, Sara learned the craft of pottery from Elango — to the chagrin of neighbors who thought she had no business learning such things.

The story begins and ends in the present. Five years have passed since Elango’s story ended. Everything has changed; the villagers have made new lives; the village has melted into the earth, taking with it the memories of the horrific event that is the novel’s defining moment. Sara remembers her father telling her that “change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.”

Sara is studying English literature in England and making pots to relieve her stress. She notes the difference between rural India, where neighbors are nosy, and England, where “curiosity is bad manners.” One of Sara’s friends is experiencing, like Elango, a form of love that is forbidden by her culture.

The collegiate Sara catches up with Elango and becomes an audience to whom he can unburden himself, “a girl who shared his language as well as momentous bits of his past.” She decides to tell his story. Sara emphasizes how he has changed, how life has taken him on an unexpected path. She also assesses how she has changed, solidifying change as one of the novel’s themes, embodied in Sara’s understanding that the cosmos is “hell-bent on doing things we can neither anticipate nor prevent.”

A dog is central to the story, adding further evidence to my conviction that every work of fiction is improved by the addition of a dog. The dog is lost when its owners suffer a carjacking. Elango adopts the dog and it becomes beloved by the village. The dog creates tension for a character who knows that its former owners are searching for him, but the character is convinced that the dog is happy and should not be uprooted again. Uprooting and rebirth are among the novel’s themes. Sara explains that where she comes from, “we have always known that ordinary days can explode without warning, leaving us broken, collecting the scattered pieces of our lives, no clear idea how to start again.”

Religious fanaticism is the story’s darkest theme. Yet Roy makes clear that religion is not necessarily to blame for the fanatics that turn religion into a vehicle for hate. Sara’s father helps her realize that the war between Hindu and Muslim is not about religion at all, but it more like the blood feud that underlies Romeo and Juliet. The story’s most hopeful theme is the possibility of repair and restoration, of fixing what’s broken or learning that we don’t need the broken thing after all.

The Earthspinner might be viewed as an allegory of the teacher and student. It might be viewed as a love story or the story of a young woman’s unrequited (and perhaps unrecognized) love. It might be viewed as an indictment of prejudice in India and the larger world. It might be viewed as a commentary on the challenges and costs of artistic creation. It might be viewed as a reflection on tests of character, how we pass or fail them or fail to recognize them. The Earthspinner is a deceptively simple novel that works on many levels, giving the reader a trove of possibilities to unpack. Like all of Roy’s work, The Earthspinner is worthy of a careful unpacking.

RECOMMENDED

This is an exciting time for readers as favorite authors offer work done during pandemic times. many of us had a hard time reading during 2020-21 when the world was upside down and there were almost no new books to mediate the transformation of everything. The Earthspinner - the title refers to creating with clay on a potter's wheel - is rich with Roy's images, relationships, love and sorrow, I value her as a writer in the lineage of Dickens and Eliot who wrote of people in their environment of family and community, politics and tribulations. I love this book.

Anuradha Roy's writing style is beautiful. I loved following the story of Elango and his sister Sara. The characters were fleshed out and very likeable. The imagery was stunning, and I loved the varied format, including narration, diary entries, etc. The exploration of religion, home, love, and more were done so well, and I am looking forward to reading more of this author's work!

With "The Earthspinner", Anuradha Roy has managed to write a somewhat timeless parable of love lost and regained, paradise lost and regained, as well as humanity lost and regained.

When I started reading this, the first chapter felt a little out of place, but it helps set some context for what comes next, and for what comes ultimately. The story is set in or around the Indian city of Hyderabad during the 1970s, and while there are times when it felt meandering a bit, the overall flow is quite poetic and lyrical. Most of all, her writing has a certain rhythm to it, and even some of her main characters seem to imbibe a certain poetic dexterity in their day-to-day lives. There were passages I had to read and re-read - they were just written so beautifully.

The promised horse, when it makes its first appearance in all its majesty, too is spot on in its rendition of numerous legends, with an almost mythical promise of deliverance - deliverance from sorrow, from strife, from time itself. These moments when Elango is working on his horse are perhaps the best parts of the novel. His obvious passion flies right off the pages, and is contagious to the other characters as well.

The overall storyline is also well structured, with just enough descriptions of discord and violence to make it scary and yet at the same time, since the first-person narrator is just a child at the time of these occurrences, it doesn't yet have the gruesome details of an adult's narration. Just the loss of innocence, and irreversibility of the flow of time.

Having said all that, I must admit I had a difficult time wading through the final chapter, which sort of dragged on, with pages of redundant material, that don't add to the core narrative, and neither do they add to our characters' development or help ur decipher anything novel.

A bit of a letdown - that last chapter, but not enough to stop me from looking out for the next work of this author.

A young woman at University in England tells the story of the potter who took her under his wing when she was a child in India.

The Earthspinner is a moving, beautifully written, and lyrical novel that weaves together stories about love, identity, and art.

The novel moves back and forth in time and is set in India and England. We are introduced to Sara, now a university student in England, who takes up pottery again and reminisces about her childhood in India and of Elango, a highly skilled potter who taught her the craft. Elango is Hindu and he falls in love with a Muslim woman, Zohra. Their community does not approve of their relationship. Elango dreams of creating a terracotta horse and can see the intricate details of it take shape in his mind as he works the clay. No one foresaw all of the different symbols and meanings people would project unto the finished terracotta horse, as its creation sets the stage for destruction.

Thank you very much to the publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC via NetGalley.

The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy is as beautiful in its prose as it is on the outside, an array of colors and fire in just the right places I loved the writing and how it holds the several themes together; longing, home, superstition, religion and a deep longing for the craft. Roy’s writing has an incredible charm that pulls you in as it pulls the reigns of her characters and the passion that drives them, be it love or a search for themselves.
Another thing that stood out for me is how these different stories develop independently of each other, even though one sets the other in motion and I thought it was wonderfully done.

Thank you so much to netgalley and publishers for providing an e-copy for me to enjoy and leave my honest feedback . I truly see this being an instant hit

"Do you know that some people drown their idols of gods and goddesses in the river after festivals?"

The Earthspinner is a wonderful read! Its beautiful prose pulls you in and the nonlinear form and multiple subplots keep you interested. I loved how pottery is used as a form of healing and processing loss. Of course I was very invested in Chinna's role in the story, dogs being the perfect beings to allow for processing emotions especially when they cannot be put to words.

"I've seen it with my own eyes," he said. "Some are tearful, parting with the idols. But still they immerse them in the river-it's part of their rituals."

The Earthspinner is an amazing story about the influence one’s culture on who we become.
I was struck with the many ways that we, as humans, can love. We can love as a man and a woman, as sisters to each other, as a dog to it’s owner and it’s owner to the pet, love of a mentor to a mentee. Just as one spins to make pottery, this book spins to make us understand human nature as it evolves differently in different countries and in different times. A simple potter is driven by a dream to create a terracotta horse, a symbol in his country. Where will the horse end, will it be created, will it change fortunes? The young girl he mentors, who has a similar love of pottery goes to England where her Eastern and Western cultures collide. A story of the young woman’s soul searching and identity seeking and self-reflection, we follow life paths that intertwine again. The use of pottery and love and fear inspired me and made me want to carry a piece of terracotta pottery as a token of belief in the possibilities of this world.

Majestically written, I loved the dog who speaks to us as he weaves through the story and his original owner who continues to search for him. An inspiring story, capturing one’s heart in many ways.

This is from a very talented author. It might best for serious readers that don't mind watching for the subtleties in the writing. Recommended.

Thanks very much for the free ARC for review!!

Another winner from Anuradha Roy. I have read all her works and I have never been disappointed.

This one tells of the story of Elango's passion for shaping a lump of earth into a terracotta horse. His love for a stray dog, his forbidden love for a neighborhood girl and the passion of the communities that can not understand everything that the horse symbolizes.

The prose is magnificent as the story moves between India and England. My only gripe is that the ending felt a little rushed. But then, all good things do come to an end.

In lyrical and layered prose, Anuradha Roy delivers work that is poetic and reflective. I loved the character-centered nature of this narrative and the ways that the author takes us on this journey. Roy is a master.