The Village
  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670921300
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

The Village

Formats & editions
EBook
25 Jul 2012
Paperback
14 Jun 2013
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

From the author of the prize-winning Gifted comes a disturbing and utterly gripping modern morality tale set in contemporary India.

Ray, a young British-Asian woman arrives in the afternoon heat of a small village in India. She has come to live there for several months to make a documentary about the place. For this is no ordinary Indian village - the women collecting water at the well, the men chopping wood in the early morning light have all been found guilty of murder. The village is an open prison. Ray is accompanied by two British colleagues and, as the days pass, they begin to get closer to the lives of the inhabitants of the village. And then it feels too close. As the British visitors become desperate for a story, the distinction between innocence and guilt, between good intentions and horrifying results becomes horribly blurred.

Set in a village modelled on a real-life open prison in India, The Village is a gripping story about manipulation and personal morality, about how truly frail our moral judgement can be. Nikita Lalwani has written a dazzling, heartfelt and disturbing novel which delivers on all the promise of her first.
  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670921300
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Nikita Lalwani

Nikita Lalwani was born in Kota, Rajasthan in 1973 and raised in Cardiff. After several years of directing factual television and documentaries at the BBC, she has returned to writing fiction. Gifted is her first novel. She lives in London.

Also by Nikita Lalwani

You People
Gifted
See all

Praise for The Village

Gripping ... Nikita Lalwani's second novel simmers with understated menace

Marie Claire

Extraordinary... What Nikita is really, really brilliant at is voice and people

BBC Radio 2

Lalwani's novel captures the hunger for self-improvement tinged with a pervasive sense of melancholy

Sunday Telegraph

'Extraordinary ... Lalwani writes with wonderful clarity and intelligence

Times

Thoughtfully and often beautifully written, The Village explores postcolonial prejudices and asks what it means to represent something 'real'

Observer

The Village is a masterclass in compression, zooming in from a wide angle establishing shot to focus on individual lives... The inmates' stories evoke larger questions about justice and privacy, power and powerlessness. Lalwani is also very good at subverting perspective. Gradually, boundaries in this novel between inside and outside shift. The notion of freedom is turned on its head.

Guardian

A thoughtful novel that envelops us in the oppression and beauty of the rural prison, yet resists simplification and stereotypes. Like the documentary process itself, her novel reveals only fragments of its characters - yet each voice is distinct, believable and stubborn in its refusal to be easily known.

Financial Times

A disturbing exploration of media ethics ... Sharp and uncompromising, it is a ripsnorting read that leaves us wondering where the needle will be pointing at the moment the moral compass is smashed to pieces ... The dissection elevates The Village from an ordinary travel thriller into Joseph Conrad territory, showing lingering post-colonial prejudices and the catastrophic effect of Westerners going East with a specific mission in mind.

The Independent on Sunday

Extraordinary... Lalwani writes with wonderful clarity and intelligence

Kate Saunders, Times