Tishani Doshi

It's not a plot that starts here.

And in fact, I really don't care about plot.

I never remember what happens in the book.

It's always about voice.

It's always about the mood that it makes you inhabit.

In a sense, I suppose that is a bit like dance and movement where you are enveloped

with language, with words and with this voice rather than something very clickety-clack like a plot.

Yeah, lots.

I mean, I think Running in the Family, English Patient, The Cat's Table, most recently Warlight.

Yeah.

So I think he's an extraordinary writer, again, because he pays so much attention to beauty.

I feel like we're so surrounded by and bombarded by ugliness that to have somebody who insists upon beauty is really important.

What have you read recently that you've loved?

So at the moment, I'm reading Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alekseevich.

And it's about the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

And she, of course, has this method, which is to record the oral histories of people and to create this chorus of voices to tell us about something that happened.

What I like about it a lot is that she focuses a lot on the stories of women.

which is this domestic interior world that, again, I'm very interested in as a writer because I feel that those are overlooked and that those are really large stories.

And again, that she is able to, even in this most horrific moment,

scenarios and incidents is able to to touch upon beauty and even humor you know it's that thing of laughter in the dark she really manages to capture that while taking us through the horror and i suppose in these days while the amazon is burning and there are fires in siberia and kashmir is