"An epic tale of love and political violence set in earthquake-ravaged Darkmotherland a
dystopian reimagining of Nepal from the Whiting Award-winning author of Arresting God in
Kathmandu. In Darkmotherland Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay has created a novel of infinite
embrace-filled with lovers and widows dictators and dissidents paupers fundamentalists and
a genderqueer power player with her eyes on the throne. At the heart of the novel are two
intertwining narratives: one of Kranti a revolutionary's daughter who marries into a
plutocratic dynasty and becomes ensnared in the family's politics. And then there is the tale
of Rosy the concubine to a brutal autocrat who undergoes her own radical body-changes and
grows into a figure of immense power. Upadhyay's novel is a romp through the vast space of a
globalized universe where personal ambitions are inextricably tied to political fortunes where
individual identities are shaped by family pressures and social reins and where the East
connects to and collides with the West in brilliant and unsettling ways"--
