Description:
A book about building a home and a wild garden on the edge of a Himalayan forest, illuminated by the author's own watercolors.
When acclaimed novelist Anuradha Roy and her husband stumble upon a derelict cottage in the hill station of Ranikhet, they decide it is where they will now live. Fresh from the neon-lit publishing offices of Delhi, Roy is initially bemused by the gentle pace of life in the mountains but then won over: spellbound by the landscape, taken to the heart of the rural community, and adopted by four mountain dogs and counting.
As Roy tries to rebuild the cottage and create a garden, she encounters nature at its most fierce, beautiful, and vulnerable, and over twenty-five years bears witness to the destructive impact of global warming on the alpine ecosystem. What emerges is a tender and intimate portrait of her surroundings in which rugged nature, lovable dogs, and recalcitrant humans come together to captivating effect. Written with unsentimental clarity, humor, and poignancy, this is a story of profound transformations.
Brief description:
Anuradha Roy is a writer and potter. She was born in Kolkata and grew up mostly in Hyderabad, India. She has written five novels. Her first, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was translated into sixteen languages. Sleeping on Jupiter, her third novel, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. All the Lives We Never Lived won the 2022 Sahitya Akademi Award, among India's highest literary honours, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her non-fiction has been published in Guardian, Paris Review, Indian Express, LitHub and elsewhere. Roy lives in Ranikhet, where she is a graphic designer at Permanent Black, a scholarly press she runs with her partner.
Review Quotes:
"Roy's writing, accompanied by her lovely watercolors and drawings, is transportive, especially when describing the lush countryside. The most gripping sections detail the effects of rapid climate change and creeping modernization. Roy's memoir is a time capsule, an ode to a way of life that might already be lost." - Booklist (starred review)
"The writing rings like a bell ... An enchanting account of life far from the city." - Kirkus Reviews
"An ode to the places we call home, Roy's memoir is lovingly rendered and illustrated by her own artwork." - Ms. Magazine
"Entrancing, consoling, humorous, and wise, Called by the Hills made me melancholy for a place I have never visited, homesick for a house and garden I've never known, and fondly attached to people I've never encountered. I felt as if I held the Himalayas in my hands while I read it." - Chloe Dalton, author of Raising Hare
"Anuradha Roy's writing makes you want to rush to the Himalaya, see the flower valleys and the bold leopards, gossip with the local cowherds, tend the stray dogs, and help out in the author's wayward garden. In every way a beautiful book." - Sebastian Faulks, author of The Seventh Son
"I always look forward to the immersive worlds full of light and shadows and color that Anuradha Roy creates. Luminous and poetic, her words reveal the frailties and desires that make us human, even when telling stories on an epic scale." - Kiran Rao, award-winning filmmaker