But if the reign of the Great Indian Novelists seems to be somewhat dimming, the Great Indian Novel is flourishing in unexpected places. The southeast regional winner of this year’s first best book, Rani Manicka, may be Malaysia-born but her The Rice Mother (Sceptre) was hailed by judges for creating "the Hindu cultural world—food, religion, rituals". Manicka’s Ceylonese-Tamil family saga was described as the coming of age of the Malaysian novel a la Vikram Seth (1994 winner) and Rohinton Mistry.
It’s rare for a writer to be so visibly moved by his own words, but Patrick French has never hidden his passion for the lost cause. One minute he was reading like any celebrity author to a packed audience at his book launch, the next moment he was so overcome that he had to stop mid-sentence. The episode that broke him down was from his new Tibet, Tibet—A Personal History of a Lost Land (HarperCollins), about a 49-year-old Tibetan ex-soldier who set himself ablaze during a demonstration in Delhi, shouting ‘Victory for Tibet! Free Tibet!’. "Ngodup’s death shook me," French told his stunned audience rather unnecessarily.
