Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

Faber and Faber, 1995, [First Edition], ISBN 0571174558, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing to edges and corners, no inscriptions, age toned pages, dustjacket shows a little edge and shelf wear (see photographs)

“In Vikram Chandra’s astonishing first novel, the gods of Poetry and Death descend on a house in India to vie for the soul of a wounded monkey.  A bargain is struck: the monkey must tell a story, and if he can keep his audience entertained, he shall live.  The result is Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a tale of nineteenth-century India: of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of hoofbeats thundering through the streets of Calcutta and the birth of a luminous child; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone  ‘mad with poetry’.  And woven into this tapestry of stories is a second, totally Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends and his eventual return to his homeland.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain is about exile, about foreigners in India and Indians abroad and the processes of national, cultural and personal redefinition implicit in these migrations.  In the tradition of Thousand and One Nights, it is a novel that celebrates the power of a story itself and explores the simple tradition of storytelling as the fundamental organizing ritual at the core of communal life.”