Roy has a talent for making the everyday lives of people interesting. Focusing on a boy, his grandfather and his mother who ran away from her life in India to become an artist, the story is full of emotion as the boy and his mother (through letters to a friend) tell how the separation impacted them. How lucky he was to have a grandfather who understood his daughter-in-law and helped his grandson mature. Based on a real artist in the pre-World War II India and Bali, the reader must read Roy’s afterword to understand how this story came about. ( )

One's sense of identity and the interior and exterior forces that help shape the person we become. Our narrator for most of the book is Myshkin, now a horticulturist, looking back on his life, the personal and the changes in his country. We learn of his mother's early life in 1930 India, and her how her childhood shaped the person she became. How her leaving when he was only nine, changed his perception and the course of his life. His father, a difficult man who makes a decision that also effects him, but provides him with a you g girl who would become his friend. A look at small town India, those who fight against colonization, and later a look at WWII and India's involvement. Much is covered here, the writing is very good, but it is a risk when including real historic characters such as Walter Spies, with the fictional story. Sometimes there is something lacking in the blending of the two.

The tale of three stories. The first part of this book which I suppose was the background, the setup of the story, I felt went on too long. Found it sometimes boring, a struggle to continue on, and had this not been mine, Angela's and Esils monthly read, would have been tempted to set it aside. Then the second third, more the story of Myshkin, his father and his dada, who was by far my favorite character, pulled me into the story. I enjoyed this part, reading his thoughts, seeing how the family was enduring, reading about the outside forces that were brought inside. Then the third part, which was a series of letters that he opens at his current age, letters that attempt to fill in the gap of he and his mother's life. Although these were the most informative, pointing to the abuse of pridoners during the war, his different countries fared during this time, much broader look at the history, I found moving away from the personal not quite what I expected.

So for me this was three separate stories that did not in my mind gel quite seamlessly. The emotional connection for me was lost, and I missed it. Other readers will feel differently I'm sure, the three of us sometimes agreed, and sometimes did not. We did, however, recognize that the prose was excellent.

ARC from Edelweiss. ( )

"It is the year 1937 that I feel on my skin." from All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

As a toddler, Myshin suffered from convulsions, which led his grandfather to nickname him after the character in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. The nickname stuck, even after the fits stopped--much to the boy's chagrin. "Innocents are what make humankind human," his grandfather explained.

In 1937 Myshkin's mother warned him to come straight home from school. Fatally, he was delayed. He never saw his mother again. She ran off with Walter Spies, a man who left his German homeland, an artist who had mentored her in her girlhood when traveling the world with her liberal-minded father.

Suffering so much loss in his life, Myshkin had turned to the things that make roots and last: trees. He became a horticulturist. He had planted a grove of flowering trees to add shade and beauty. Now the city wants to tear them down. Does anything last in this world?

Myshkin is in his sixties when a package arrives from his mother's best friend. The contents send Myshkin on a journey into his past.

The novel is Myshkin's record, his way of coming to terms with his past.

Set in 1937 through WWII, in India and the Dutch East Indies, the setting is unfamiliar and exotic.

The human story is universal:

The life-long hollowness of a man whose childhood recurrent fear of abandonment became real.

How the conflict between private life and the work of political revolution split a family. Myshkin's father, an academic, was active in the Indian Independence Movement, an idealist who could not understand his wife's joy in painting and dance.

The motives, and costs, behind a young woman's breaking free of the constraints of her husband's expectations

The fear that incarcerated non-hostile aliens during wartime.

I was moved by Myshkin's story. The intensity picks up when we learn the contents of the package, letters from his mother to her friend. From the personal suffering of a child, the novel turns to her tragic story.

Roy's research into the time period and the historical persons who appear in the novel bring to life a time few Americans know about. I am thrilled to have read it.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. ( )