'The Elsewhereans': Jeet Thayil's latest novel on migration, identity to hit stands on June 23

New Delhi, May 29 (PTI) A new novel by author Jeet Thayil, releasing on June 23, will be a meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity, Harper Collins India announced on Thursday.

"The Elsewhereans" melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, and photographs into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades.

Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation - both the ones who leave and ones left behind - from the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, and Paris.

"'The Elsewhereans' came to me of its own accord, falling into my lap in its entirety, arising out of material that carried its own mandate, ancestral material that had built up over the decades. I am happy to see it out in the world at last," Thayil said in a statement.

An elegy for vanished worlds, "The Elsewhereans" is a novel of retrieval and reinvention.

Comparing it with his previous two books, "I'll Have it Here" and "The City under the City", Harper Collins editor-at-large Rahul Soni said that "The Elsewhereans" breaks new ground for Thayil.

"...a deeply personal novel, a very moving one, but also perhaps his most experimental, bringing together different stories, modes and materials - fictional, real and in between, ranging over decades and continents - to examine ideas of home and exile and belonging, loss and grief, in sentences burnished and precise yet full of beauty. This is a novel to read and re-read," Soni said.

In his advance praise of the book, writer Amitav Ghosh said, "A wonderfully rich evocation of the era of decolonisation and non-alignment, and the peripatetic lives and multiple perspective that made it possible". PTI MAH MAH MAH