Nine-Chambered Heart

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories, Seahorse: A Novel, and The Nine-Chambered Heart, best-selling in India, which has also been published in ten languages including Italian, Spanish, French and German. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Her work – including art reviews, book reviews, fiction and poetry – has featured in a wide selection of national magazines and newspapers. 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.Currently, she teaches creative writing and the history of art at Ashoka University and lives in New Delhi, India, with a cat of many names.

‘It’s the artful pleating of this subtle, psychologically astute novel that sets it apart, each shard-like vignette deepening our concern for its central character as we see into her lovers’ hearts and minds’ Daily Mail‘Superb. She had me at page one’ Chris Cleave‘Sublime … Pariat writes with great elegance, her sentences rich with introspection. There’s a feeling of poetry to the language … captivating’ Irish Times‘A tender puzzle of a book. Its bewitching premise forces us to slowly put the pieces together, our understanding of the protagonist layering with each chapter – and yet maintains the tantalising distance that the ones who've loved her experience too. We know her, but only as much as they know her. It explores with sharp beauty the mystery at the centre of loving anyone, the various things we present and project through the relationships of our lives,’ Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure‘Whatever Janice Pariat is doing in these vignettes – unravelling layers, offering shards, making and unmaking a heart – she forces you to alter your vision. By turning the intimate eye of love inside out, she’s saying, here is the real wonder: a whole is made of many broken parts. It is a startling way to look at ourselves, to reach for the stories of our own hearts’ Tishani Doshi