Indu Sundaresan was raised in India and came to the U.S. for graduate school in economics and operations research. Soon after graduating, she began writing fiction and is the author of the Taj trilogy (The Twentieth Wife, The Feast of Roses, Shadow Princess), set in 17th-century India; The Splendor of Silence, set in India in 1942; and a collection of contemporary Indian short stories titled In the Convent of Little Flowers. The first of the Taj trilogy is currently being filmed for the Indian television channel Epic. Her sixth book, The Mountain of Light (Washington Square Press, October 8, 2013), is about the Kohinoor diamond, its last Indian owners and how it was secreted out of India to England and Queen Victoria.
On your nightstand now:
Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James. I've dipped into this part of Indian history in the writing of my own novels at various places. In the Taj trilogy, the first ships from the English East India Company arrive on Indian shores. In The Splendor of Silence, it's five years before the end of the Raj and just before independence. In my latest book, The Mountain of Light, the British have already conquered large chunks of India--four years after the novel ends, in 1858, the East India Company is dissolved and India becomes a British colony; the British Raj officially begins then.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Anything by Enid Blyton; she created worlds I was unfamiliar with--the descriptions of high teas under an oak on the front lawn, and midnight feasts in boarding schools, were scrumptious. I wanted to be there.
Your top five authors:
Josephine Tey, Jane Austen, Ian McEwan, Chitra Divakaruni, Amy Tan.
Book you've faked reading:
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Rather, I've begun this book many times, read a few pages, and never finished it. One day, when I have a nice, big piece of time, I will.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) were the more well-known sisters. Anne was the quiet one, even in their lifetimes, but she wrote a powerhouse of a novel which has everything--a mystery, a history, an enigmatic woman, a passionate young man, the wild, wild moors with their mood-influencing winds and storms.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman, both for the cover and the title. The inside's just as good as the outside.
Books that changed your life:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I read them both when I was in eighth grade, something like that--they set me thinking. There was a lot about America's history I didn't know until then.
Favorite line from a book:
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." --From 1984 by George Orwell. The novel was required reading in a high school literature class; analyzing it, picking it apart, made it that much more effective for me. That first line was odd; drew the reader in, but when you're done reading, you realize that it's only the starting point for a mass of oddities. Orwell had a frightening prescience of our brave new world.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.