My Beloved Life

Here's the cover of my new novel coming out in February, 2024

Here’s the cover of my new novel, designed by Oliver Munday, and prepared under the guidance of my editor at Knopf, Diana Miller. I will urge you (only a million times) to pre-order the book here. My Beloved Life is being published in India by Aleph, by Picador in the UK, and by Hamish Hamilton in Canada.

I have many readers on Substack who are from India. For those among them who have Hindi, I want to take this opportunity to urge them to buy the translation of my first novel brought out by Rajkamal. It is titled घर बेगाना हुआ किया and can be bought at a very reasonable price here.

The other night I was visiting a friend’s house for dinner. There were books everywhere. He was making lamb chops for me and so I opened a book I saw there. It was an instructional book for artists. The Campari I was drinking has wiped out any memory of the title or the author but what I have with me now are the words I noted down in my journal: “Amplification is the basic building block of all art. Find one simple idea and build on it—fast, slow, inverted, forward, splintered, whole.” I need to thank Hemali Sodhi and Udayan Mitra for helping me produce The Blue Book last year; it really is about using drawings and journal entries to produce sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, sense of living in contemporary times. It is a simple idea and I’ve engaged in an amplification of that idea also in The Yellow Book which will be coming out later this year from HarperCollins India.

After my return from my travels along the Ganga, I have been trying to make notes on new work but life interrupts—my most focused moments today were taken by a call to an insurance company to deal with damages to my daughter’s car. Yesterday I prepared the surface of two wooden panels for landscape painting. Hope to share the results in a week or two. Here is a water color from my journey by boat. It is titled “Sundarbans Diary.”