Author Description

From the award-winning author of Toxic Spirits comes a new and heartbreaking novel about cruelty and marginalization, and the struggle to find meaning in a world of mounting prejudice and false belief. Gay but still closeted and missing his wife Helen — who has fled their home to become a Buddhist nun — Ali Akbar returns in old age from California to India. At the Deer Park where the Buddha gave his first sermon, he comes across a flyer that promises to teach him how to find love again. After being assaulted outside the park at a parade led by a religious fundamentalist, Ali attempts to make good on the promise of the flyer, traveling from Benares up towards the icy heights of Mount Kailash. Along the way, Ali is forced to come to terms with the relentless sexual abuse he suffered in childhood in India, as well as his personal failures, including his expulsion from Cambridge University, his failed career hopes, and most of all, his relationships with Helen and their daughter Homa. Navigating between competing fundamentalisms that mark a time of social collapse, Ali tries, in the time that he has left, to seize that last chance to find love again -- even if it takes a very different form from what he expected. Steeped in the philosophies of classical Greece and India, and layered with colorful travelogues in India, England, and the US, The Conquest of Kailash is written in Mani’s characteristically atmospheric and humane style that has attracted readers worldwide.