Tag: The Wildings
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The Wildings: Mara’s story
Mara’s story She was an orange kitten with deep green eyes, no bigger than the palm of my partner’s hand. Mara had been rescued from a drain in Sujan Singh Park by my cousin, and was temporarily living with them and their three dogs. “We have to find someone to adopt her!” said Kamini. “Yes,”…
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A clutch of covers
The year went by in such a whoosh of edits, columns and tentative dabs at some new writing that it took me a while to realise that The Girl Who Ate Books had actually been finished, dented, painted, buffed and handed over to Somak and Krishan at HarperCollins. (Backstory here.) And that The Wildings and…
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Imaginary places: The Wildings map
I wish I’d learned to draw properly (more School of Gunter Grass, less School of Edna O’Brien). I blame some of my woeful inability to sketch anything at all on the art teacher who made us draw apples for three months straight after which I a) nursed an aversion to drawing b) still associate apples…
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The Hundred Names of Darkness
“A delight to read. Eliot’s Old Possum would have enjoyed these Practical Indian Cats.” Salman Rushdie In the sequel and conclusion to her critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling novel, The Wildings, Nilanjana Roy takes us back to the Delhi neighbourhood of Nizamuddin, and its unforgettable cats–Mara, Southpaw, Katar, Hulo and Beraal. As they recover slowly…
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The Hundred Names of Darkness
“The night hides more than predators until we know it so well that we can speak its many names without fear; and yet, we live most keenly under the wing of darkness.” ~ Kirri The Hundred Names of Darkness, Aleph Book Company “But how do you make friends with the night?” From the branches of…
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The Wildings
Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (2013), the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award (2013) and the Tata First Book Literary Award (2012) “You’re a Sender,” she remembered her mother telling her, the day she had opened her eyes for the first time. Mara had been curled up, a tiny comma against her mother’s warm flank, listening…
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Journal: The Wildings come out to play
Backstage at the Akshara Theatre, it felt as though I knew everybody already. Which I did, because I’d written them. That self-possessed girl in the tigress costume was Tawny, short for Mulligatawny; the high-voltage compressed .ZIP file of pure energy was Hulo; the shy soft-spoken girl in brown was secretly Kirri the killer mongoose. There’s…
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The Wildings
From The Wildings, published by Aleph Book Company, August 2012: They began to stroll back home; the moon was passing behind clouds and its light was touched with purple and yellow, like an old bruise. They had almost reached the road to the canal when Southpaw felt all his fur stand up at once, Miao…
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The Wildings: Reviews, in Junglee
(For The Wildings website, go here; to order a copy, go here.) Reviewer, hard at work. What the reviewers say: (Mostly) Ayes: “A few pages into Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, you’ll wish you had whiskers and could mew. The world as imagined by Roy in this remarkable debut is filled with marvels, not the least of which is the…
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Prabha Mallya: Illustrator’s Note
Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, on my third reading of it (a couple of months after the last illustration for the book was handed in) still moves me deeply. It was always meant to be an illustrated book. The story reveals a living, vibrant, layered world that exists right here part of our bustling human settlements, that…
nilanjana s roy 