William Dalrymple - Nine Lives - In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com
http://www.bloomsbury.com/ninelives
Nine people. Nine Lives. Each taking a different religious path. This is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.

A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfilment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as a deity; then, at the end of February each year, he returns to prison.

An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows by heart. A devadasi - or temple prostitute - initially resists her own initiation into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling.

Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerising, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the region's rapid change. A distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, Nine Lives is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.

Read an extract from Nine Lives here:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/article.aspx?tpid=3696&aid=9267

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• India
• Religion
• William
• Dalrymple
• Buddhism
• Travel
• Travel Writing
• South Asia
• Canterbury Tales
• Jhumpa Lahiri
• Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Bestseller

[prathyush7827]

good work! read it too!

[raghunathyoga]

love his books. love this guy. 9 lives was incredible and the first story of the jain nun-actually broke me down for two weeks. i couldn't get it out of my head and i had to stop reading. i was so disturbed/excited....her story touched the core of my heart.

that being said -loved the entire book

[sankes]

This book is a masterpiece- essential reading

[assassin0mid]

he is an awesome author !!