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Latitudes of Longing: An Epic of Ghosts and Glaciers
A debut novel reminds us that the earth itself is alive, and that even in our isolation we are members of a changing world.
Early in Shubhangi Swarup’s novel , 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 touches on 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.
