Books by Anuradha Roy

A horse was in flames. It roamed beneath the ocean breathing fire . . . 'When he wakes up, Elango knows his life has changed. His dream will consume him until he gives it shape. The potter must create a terracotta horse whose beauty will be reason enough for its existence. Yet he cannot pin down from where it has galloped into his mind - the Mahabharata, or Trojan legend, or his anonymous potter-ancestors. Nor can he say where it belongs - in a temple compound, within a hotel lobby, or with Zohra, whom he despairs of ever marrying.The astral, indefinable force driving Elango towards forbidden love and creation has unleashed other currents. A neighbourhood girl begins her bewildering journey into adulthood, developing a complicated relationship with him. A lost dog adopts him, taking over his heart. Meanwhile, his community is driven by inflammatory passions of a different kind. Here, people, animals, and even the gods live on a knife's edge and the consequences of daring to dream against the tide are cataclysmic.Moving between India and England, The Earthspinner reflects the many ways in which the East encounters the West. It breathes new life into ancient myths, giving allegorical shape to the war of fanaticism against reason and the imagination.

Moving its protagonists between India and Britain, The Earthspinner shows the many ways in which the East encounters the West, fanaticism wars tirelessly against reason, and the individual's creative desires struggle against a populace's basic instinct for destruction.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2015 - A stark and unflinching novel by a spellbinding storyteller, about religion, love and violence in the modern world

Everywhere, as the author states, capitalism is triumphant and Marxism seems irrelevant''. Yet, not that long ago, many had thought that capitalism would collapse, owing to its own inherent contradictions, and be replaced by a just and egalitarian world order, following the ideals of Marxism. Anuradha Roy argues that it is important to understand this failure at the very roots, which were responsible for a huge gap between Marxism''s promise and practice, leading to its downfall. A communist party, the CPI (M) had been elected in Bengal and ruled for 34 years until it came to an abrupt end in 2011, now on its way to disappearing from the public space all over India. Yet India has much poverty and deprivation still; remaining fertile ground for ideas of equality and social justice. This book, on Marxian thought in Bengal rather than a history of the Marxist movement, discusses the different shades of Bengal Marxism, also including oppositional views. The Marxists believed that the revolution would take place in the realm of culture, narrowly defined, creating an unbridgeable distance from the masses. Many of the sources have been taken from well-known Bengali journals, not available in English, earlier. Roy points out that it was the non-Marxist intellectuals who did justice to Marxism by acknowledging its possibilities and questioning its inadequacies. The author discusses how many scholars have reinvented Marxism as a modifier to disciplines like literature, history, sociology and political science, often combining Marxism with postmodernism. Roy argues that if we think of Marxism as a tradition, not as a doctrine offering an all-embracing explanation of the past and the present and capable of predicting the future, we shall derive much valuable inspiration from it.

A woman struggles with her past, as she sees her familiar world being swept away by India's brutal modernity.

A love story - as beautiful as it is unbearably sad - about two people who choose each other when others have abandoned them.