Book One

first published in 1995, this new edition was released in December 2023

“A free-flowing narrative in verse and prose that marked the debut of an astonishing new voice in literature.”

Reading Sharmistha Mohanty’s Book One, you keep turning the pages, not to follow the story — though there is a story being told in every page, and in every page she tells a different story which is yet part of the fabric of the same telling — but to follow her sentences. They are unflinching, tender, unexpected, aphoristic, violently observant and violently restrained: “to feel pain but never to come to tears”. You read because you want to know where they will take you next. She gives no hint. Whether it is to the unnamed riverine land of her ancestors or, in an unnamed city, to a house whose plaster keeps falling, they invariably lead to a place “as clear and unsentimental and right as life”.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

What she writes about, with great sensitivity and originality, is her life and those of her ancestors, of changing traditions which nevertheless remain radically unchanged, of weather, water and sexual relationships … She tautens and tightens her words around every situation to create it almost visibly in the mind … She seems to me a real discovery. What she has written may be in the tradition of Tagore, but she has made it original and modern.

Dom Moraes

Excerpts

Scroll.in

Excerpts from Book One have also appeared in the NEW WRITING ANTHOLOGY 15, published in the U.K. by the British Council and Granta, June, 2007, in INDIAN LITERATURE, and DNA INDIA.

First Edition

BOOK ONE was originally published in 1995 as a limited edition, each cover an original etching by the late artist Yogesh Rawal, and each copy hand titled by the author.