Dear Reader…
First of all, thank you for picking up my book. It is a
confusing and curious thing; it is only about two hundred pages, and yet it has
sixteen characters. Each of the sixteen characters has enough bravado to carry
a novel of their own, and yet, they get only ten pages. It is also blurring
back and forth, here and there. Sometimes, you are in the big city, sometimes
you are in a village with only silt and creek. A lot is happening in each of
these four places; and yet the world feels so small, and intimate. It might
seem all so very confusing.
It also feels so different, and so inviting. To be lost in language, to surrender to the words. To know that this is an author who knows what he is doing. And, he loves his readers. He wants just what is simply the best for them.
A bit more about me: I am an Indian-American polyglot,
digital nomad, and wanderer. I chose to spend the last nine years traveling the
world. I have been to about 132 countries, lived in 18 places, and have learnt
to pick up 12 languages. I am trying to live a life where I can truly be one with
the world; with its rhythms, with its feelings, with its needs. I wanted to
truly become a Global Citizen. And from that space, my mind changed. I learnt
to think Globally, outside of the bounds of place, culture, and border.
I want to write books that can help transform my reader to become the same way. Not everyone can travel like me, not everyone can learn as much as me, but I believe that in my fiction, you can feel, at least for a few pages, what it means to be someone else, and then to be someone else again, to always be shifting location, moving place, and yet to feel a Oneness in the constant change.
The magic of literature is to transport the full
sensibilities of a person and his way of thinking upon reading the writer’s
work. I hope that after you read my book that you will be able to read what I
have said here and truly feel it. My love to you, and warmest wishes,
Kiran Bhat
Kiran Bhat
About the Author
Website → http://iguanabooks.ca/
About the Book
The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.
Like modern communication networks, the stories in , we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.
As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary text.”
Bhat continues: “I wanted to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s intellectual growth.”
“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”
we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017.
Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.
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