An ambitious, multilayered work that interweaves four unique journeys across Continents and centuries
“Ambitious and capacious ... As the reader journeys through this atmospheric and accomplished novel, they discover that the natural world around us is loud enough for those willing to listen, and Pariat has found the language for it.”—The Guardian
 “Wise, funny, touching, wide-ranging, deep-delving; whip-smart dialogue and graceful, paced sentences, thousands upon thousands of them. Written by a novelist with the eye of a poet, and a poet with the narrative powers of a novelist, this is a book that needed to be written, that tells true things, and is entirely its own being.”—Robert MacFarlane, author of The Lost Words and Underland
In Everything the Light Touches, we meet many travelers. Shai, a young Indian woman who journeys to India’s northeast and rediscovers ways of being that realign her. Evelyn, a Cam-bridge student who seeks out the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, botanist and taxonomist, who famously declared “God creates; Linnaeus organizes” and led an expedition to Lapland in 1732. Goethe, who traveled through Italy in the 1780s, formulating his ideas for a revelatory text that called for a reexamination of our propensity to reduce plants—and the world—into immutable parts.
Everything the Light Touches brings together people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet all is resonance, we discover; all is connection.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Janice Pariat is the author of the novel Seahorse, the bestselling novella The Nine-Chambered Heart, and the short story collection Boats on Land. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Her art reviews, book reviews, fiction, and poetry has featured in a wide selection of magazines and newspapers across India. In 2014, she was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, UK, and most recently, in 2019, a writer-in-residence at the Toji Cultural Foundation, South Korea. She teaches creative writing and the history of art at Ashoka University and lives in New Delhi, India, with a cat of many names.