Siddharth Shanghvi's new book a memoir of death, grief
New Delhi: Author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi makes his non-fiction debut with a collection of personal essays on mortality which will be published next month.
He draws on a string of devastating personal losses - of his mother, of his father and of a beloved pet - to tell what it means to lose someone.
With surgical detachment and subtle feeling, Shanghvi charts the landscape of bereavement as he takes the reader down the dark, winding path to healing in his book Loss, publishers HarperCollins India said.
"A book about loss could be a sorrowful thing. But the powerful thing about language and distance is how your biggest losses can grow into your greatest solace: you just have to hang out with the pain long enough until it begins to mend you," Goa-based Shanghvi said.
One of the things, he said, that writing this book has taught him was how to measure sorrow, and how to set them aside.
According to Udayan Mitra, publisher at HarperCollins India, "In powerful, nuanced, evocative prose, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi etches out the patterns death, grief and mourning leave on us, and shows us how we come to make sense of life as a result."
"In three essays in 'Loss', I've tried to look in the eye what I have lost; I never thought that everything, and everyone, we have lost could mark our character so profoundly," said Shanghvi, whose first novel The Last Song of Dusk won the Betty Trask Award, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize.
His second book, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize. His most recent book is The Rabbit & the Squirrel.
