Jaipur Journals

One of the founders and directors of the world’s largest free literary festival presents a moving novel that searches the inspirations and heartbreaks of the writing life.

Meet a colourful cast of characters – an icon of queer literature who receives a malevolent anonymous letter, the septuagenarian who carries her unpublished novel in a canvas tote bag, the burglar who is also a passionate poet, the American writer searching the vanished India of her hippie youth. This metafictional, wryly funny, pacey novel told from multiple perspectives, is set against the backdrop of the vibrant multilingual Jaipur Literature Festival. Its diverse stories of regret and lost love, self-doubt and new beginnings come together in a narrative as varied as India itself.

Partly a satire on the glittering set that throngs the festival grounds, partly an ode to the pathos and broken aspirations of writers who wander the earth with unsubmitted manuscripts in their bags and pen drives, Jaipur Journals is a sure-footed romp across the landscape of the literary world. It showcases in full form Gokhale’s unsparing eye for the pretensions and the pathos of that loneliest of tribes – the writers.