A event on Monday 16th June. The event starts at 19:00.
Gloucester Road Books presents two wonderful writers, Gurnaik Johal and Ariel Saramandi, whose new books masterfully examine the legacy of empire and the snowballing climate crisis in distinct, dynamic ways.
Award-winning author, Gurnaik Johal’s scintillating, Saraswati, an Observer Best Debut Novel 2025, sets India’s past in collision with a rivalrous future in a moving and all-consuming debut from one of the UK’s most feted young writers.
Ariel Saramandi’s collection of essays, Portrait of an Island on Fire, is a searing account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history. The book is a milestone in thinking about the lasting social and political effects of colonialism, and how they impact government policy, the environment, education and much more.
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Praise for Saraswati:
‘Saraswati most certainly delivers, darting thrillerishly around the world to fold chewy themes of empire, populism and global warming into a cross-generational epic’ – The Observer
‘A surging, roaring, deluge of a novel, which ebbs and flows with a flood of wonderfully overlapping stories. I absolutely loved it’ – Jon McGregor
Praise for Portrait of an Island on Fire:
‘These overlapping essays form a coruscating portrait of a place and make for a searing indictment of our times.’ - Lucy Caldwell
‘This important book is both heartbreaking and a wake-up call: is it too late to act? A small, supposedly paradisiac island is teetering on a brink – a mirror of our world. But who really cares?’ – Ananda Devi
...
Gurnaik Johal’s short story collection We Move (Serpent’s Tail, 2022) won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Tata Literature Live! Prize, was a Guardian Book of the Year, and a Hindustan Times Book of the Year. He won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2022, and has since had work featured in BBC Radio 4’s Short Works series, as well as in the short fiction anthology Duets (Scratch Books, 2024). Saraswati is his first novel.
Ariel Saramandi is an Anglo-Mauritian writer living in Mauritius. Her fiction and essays have been published by Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The White Review, among others. She has reported on Mauritius for the likes of the BBC and NBC. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023 and the Stinging Fly Summer School 2023. She is a member of the MMM’s Commission de Développement Durable.
Entry requirements: 16+, any under 18s accompanied by 21+ adult 1:1 ratio
Award-winning author, Gurnaik Johal’s scintillating, Saraswati, an Observer Best Debut Novel 2025, sets India’s past in collision with a rivalrous future in a moving and all-consuming debut from one of the UK’s most feted young writers.
Ariel Saramandi’s collection of essays, Portrait of an Island on Fire, is a searing account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history. The book is a milestone in thinking about the lasting social and political effects of colonialism, and how they impact government policy, the environment, education and much more.
...
Praise for Saraswati:
‘Saraswati most certainly delivers, darting thrillerishly around the world to fold chewy themes of empire, populism and global warming into a cross-generational epic’ – The Observer
‘A surging, roaring, deluge of a novel, which ebbs and flows with a flood of wonderfully overlapping stories. I absolutely loved it’ – Jon McGregor
Praise for Portrait of an Island on Fire:
‘These overlapping essays form a coruscating portrait of a place and make for a searing indictment of our times.’ - Lucy Caldwell
‘This important book is both heartbreaking and a wake-up call: is it too late to act? A small, supposedly paradisiac island is teetering on a brink – a mirror of our world. But who really cares?’ – Ananda Devi
...
Gurnaik Johal’s short story collection We Move (Serpent’s Tail, 2022) won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Tata Literature Live! Prize, was a Guardian Book of the Year, and a Hindustan Times Book of the Year. He won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2022, and has since had work featured in BBC Radio 4’s Short Works series, as well as in the short fiction anthology Duets (Scratch Books, 2024). Saraswati is his first novel.
Ariel Saramandi is an Anglo-Mauritian writer living in Mauritius. Her fiction and essays have been published by Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The White Review, among others. She has reported on Mauritius for the likes of the BBC and NBC. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023 and the Stinging Fly Summer School 2023. She is a member of the MMM’s Commission de Développement Durable.
Entry requirements: 16+, any under 18s accompanied by 21+ adult 1:1 ratio
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