Escaping life’s harsh realities through the creative process

Fiction: All the Lives We Never Lived, By Anuradha Roy , MacLehose Press, €21

It is 1992 and retired gardener Myshkin Chand Rozario, nick-named after the princely protagonist in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, sets about writing his memoirs in a sleepy Indian town, finding himself drawn back to 1937, the year he became known as “the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman”.

Gayatri had indeed left her husband and son behind, ...