A Cubist portrait of modern, global India

Saraswati is a heavily researched and thematically suggestive telling of how nationalism refracts onto class, climate and relationships

- Clement Yong

SARASWATI By Gurnaik Johal Fiction/Serpent's Tail/Paperback/ 374 pages/$32.95

There are shades of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) and Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) in this panorama of interconnected tales – of seven members of a Punjabi family, distantly related, spread across the globe during a time of Hindu fundamentalist resurgence in India.

It requires the kind of ambitious plotting and story mapping that has appealed to predominantly male authors of late, in search of polyvocal epics that can be contained in something less than a franchise.

British-Indian author Gurnaik Johal debuted with the short story cycle, We Move (2022), which experimented with recurring characters in the same milieu.

This is a more obviously cohesive and mature follow-up, its grand sweep rooted in hyper-specific actors, all brought together at the very end. There is further temporal dilation with his callbacks to the ancient Punjabi tradition of the qisse, the traditional oral storytelling of yore.

The instigating event is the apparent return of the mythical Saraswati river, which Satnam, recalled back to India after the death of his grandmother, suddenly has a front-row seat to as owner of a previously arid well.

Johal gives readers an engrossing story of a poor emigrant finding "an abundance of time" once he decides not to sell the land and return to England, including also a memorable scene of his struggling to burn the property's last water buffalo – too young for the meat to be sold for anything.