“A highly affecting and finely crafted story... Lanterns is a seductive novel about the potential change beckoning hundreds of millions of Indians: a witness to India's complex interiors, and the revolutionary "churn" underway. This wonderfully warm and properly grounded novel is a great place to become familiar with it.” Independent on Sunday

'A marvellous book. Great novels succeed in telling the truth in ways that the most detailed textbooks can never hope to achieve, and Lanterns on their Horns does just this. Radhika Jha deals with that most serious of subjects, how to introduce modern methods to backward rural communities, with a sensitivity, a playfulness and an empathy which forces the reader to understand what is at stake. The village of Old Nandgaon will live on in the reader’s heart long after progress has swept its real life counterparts into the dustbin of history. Through the passions, the struggles, the ambitions and the tragedies of the inhabitants of Nandgaon, the reader begins to understand something about what is lost as well as gained when a poor rural village is dragged into the twenty-first century. Lanterns on their Horns will change the way you think about the world’s poorest billion.' Michael Ridpath

'Lanterns on their Horns is my favourite book of the year. It vividly and touchingly portrays the process of modernization at village level in India, a country I know and love. Finely drawn characters of all persuasions in a wonderful, emotional story, beautifully written.'
Sir Robin Christopher

Manoj Mishra gives up his PhD and moves with his wife to work at an institute that perfects the artificial insemination of the Indian cow with European sperm so she produces more milk to end poverty in Indian villages. In Nandgaon, a village that has consciously decided to turn its back on modernity, the simple Ramu sneaks off and marries a beautiful educated girl, Laxmi, who is considered tainted because of her father's suicide. Soon after his marriage, Ramu finds an abandoned cow in the forest and adopts it. The two unlikely couples meet, and what is at stake is not a cow or a human, but the identify of Nandgaon, and of India itself.

Lanterns on Their Horns is a huge, ambitious and compulsive novel reminiscent of both Charles Dickens and Naguib Mahfouz.

Radhika Jha is from India (born Delhi 1970), studied anthropology at Amherst College and did her Masters in Political Science from the University of Chicago and has lived in Paris as an exchange student. She writes and performs Odissi dancing. She has worked for Hindustan Times and BusinessWorld writing on culture, the environment and the economy. She has also worked for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, where she started up the Interact project for the education of the children of the victims of terrorism in different parts of India. She now lives in Tokyo with her husband and two children.

Details

• ISBN 9781905636655
• Published in paperback August 2010
• Format: B format paperback
• Pages: 480

Rights information

• UK and Commonwealth ex Canada