“It is only as The New New Delhi Book Club was published that I saw that there was a distinct thread linking all my apparently disparate works. ” Radhika Swarup (Author- The New New Delhi Book Club)
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Team Kitaab is in conversation with Radhika Swarup, author of The New New Delhi Book Club (Tranquebar, 2024) where we talk about her inspiration behind the book and her writing journey so far.
Radhika Swarup is a lapsed banker and now a writer. Her work explores the themes of identity and exile. Her last novel Civil Lines looked at India’s 2018 Me Too moment, and was longlisted for the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Best Novel Award. here the River Parts, her debut novel, dealt with the lives and fortunes of a Hindu–Muslim couple parted in Punjab during the Partition of India and Pakistan and was chosen by Amazon India as one of their memorable books of 2016. It was also long listed by the Authors’ Club for the Best First Novel Award.
Radhika lives in London and visits Delhi often.
About the Book
THE PORTRAIT OF A COMMUNITY, IN THIS CASE A DELHI NEIGHBOURHOOD, FACING THE UNCERTAINLY OF THE PANDEMIC TOGETHER.
As the pandemic brings India to a halt, an elderly woman falls down in her home and hears her leg break. Next door, a young girl stuck indoors persuades her taciturn old neighbour to set up a book club. A few doors down, a wife contemplates the plans she once made with an ex-boyfriend as her husband grows distant. A young boy falls in love with a girl on the rooftop across. A market trader battles against being housebound until his cousin is felled by the virus. And a migrant labourer sets off on foot, heading back to his village as work dries up in the city.
Evocative, lyrical and uplifting, the interconnected stories in The New New Delhi Book Club reveal Radhika Swarup’s innate ability to paint a vivid portrait of a community and to find hope and joy even in the most trying of times.
