The Archer

By: Shruti Swamy

Narrated by: Sneha Mathan

Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

“Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy’s first book, the story collection A House Is a Body.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love.”—NPR

In this transfixing novel, a young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya’s childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day she peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak, a dazzling, centuries-old dance form that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Her pursuit of artistic transcendence through kathak soon becomes the organizing principle of her life, even as she leaves home for college and falls in complicated love with her best friend. As the uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother.

Lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as mesmerizing as kathak itself, Shruti Swamy’s The Archer is a bold portrait of a singular woman coming of age as an artist—navigating desire, duty, and the limits of the body. It is also an electrifying and utterly immersive story about the transformative power of art, and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready.

©2021 Shruti Swamy (P)2022 Algonquin Books

Critic reviews

Longlisted for the 2021 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

“Mesmerizingly poetic . . . The Archer’s beauty resides in Swamy's sequential narrative form, which reads like music—at times almost exactly like reading a musical score—but with something more; her words carry the visceral power of a dancer's intersection with air . . . [A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love . . . A sensual, artful dance, powerfully told.”—NPR

“This novel swallowed me whole. The Archer is the kind of book you always hope for: lush and sensual, tasted and felt, with striking images that play out like film behind the eyes. Swamy evokes an India that resists flat stereotype and teems with exuberance, beauty, and life. The Archer is timeless yet utterly modern as it asks what it means for a woman to make a life of art.”—C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Shruti Swamy is a writer to celebrate. Her fiction is provocative, precise, and gorgeously inventive.”—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning