Better to Have Gone by Akash Kapur

Better to Have Gone by Akash Kapur

*Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, New Statesman, Air Mail, and more * Longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize * Recipient of a Whiting Grant*

A "haunting and elegant" (The Wall Street Journal) story about love, faith, the search for utopia--and the often devastating cost of idealism.

It's the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world--Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright.

So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon? This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone, and it carries deep personal resonance: Diane and John were the parents of Akash's wife, Auralice. Akash and Auralice grew up in Auroville; like the rest of their community, they never really understood those deaths.

In 2004, Akash and Auralice return to Auroville from New York, where they have been living with John's family. As they reestablish themselves in the community, along with their two sons, they must confront the ghosts of those distant deaths. Slowly, they come to understand how the tragic individual fates of John and Diane intersected with the collective history of their town.

"A riveting account of human aspiration and folly taken to extremes" (The Boston Globe), Better to Have Gone probes the underexplored yet universal idea of utopia and portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one such community. Richly atmospheric and filled with remarkable characters, spread across time and continents, this is narrative writing of the highest order--a "gripping...compelling...[and] heartbreaking story, deeply researched and lucidly told" (The New York Times Book Review).

Akash Kapur is the former Letter from India columnist for the International Herald Tribune and the online edition of The New York Times. He has also written for The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He holds a B.A. in social anthropology from Harvard, and a doctorate in law from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar. He lives outside Pondicherry, in southern India.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781501132520
ISBN 10	1501132520
Title	Better to Have Gone
Author	Akash Kapur
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Scribner Book Company
Year published	2022-07-12
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable