Book description
With emotional precision and narrative subtlety, The Royal Ghosts features characters trying to reconcile their true desires with the forces at work in Nepali society. Against the backdrop of the violent Maoist insurgencies that have claimed thousands of lives, these characters struggle with their duties to their aging parents, an…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Royal Ghosts as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Samrat Upadhyay’s English-language novels and short stories often read like anthropological work on Nepal’s middle class.
The Royal Ghosts fictionalizes the sluggish economy in and urban migration to contemporary Kathmandu, the decade-long civil war that ended along with the collapse of the Hindu monarchy in 2006, and the political tensions that defined Nepal in the first decade of the current millennium. His attention to the previous king’s grasp at power using political propaganda in the form of monumental billboards in 1990 (in “Supreme Pronouncements”) reflects my own interest in similar rhetoric fifteen years later.
I also like the use of…
From Michael's list on Kathmandu, Nepal.
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