Namita Gokhale’s upcoming novel Jaipur Journals, is set against the backdrop of the vibrant and multi-lingual Jaipur Literature Festival. It will be published by Penguin Random House India under its Viking imprint. Jaipur Journals will be launched at the very stage it is set on in January next year. 

It is a moving metafictional novel that searches the inspirations and heartbreaks of that loneliest of tribes – the writers. Like the literature festival that put Jaipur on the map of literature globally, Gokhale’s book is a mixed bag of tales.

It features a colourful cast of characters – the icon of queer literature who receives a malevolent anonymous letter, the burglar with a passion for poetry, the child prodigy who is determined to make it to the top, the American writer looking for the vanished India of her youth, the lonely writer in her seventies who carries her unpublished novel in a canvas bag wherever she goes.

William Dalrymple, author and festival co-director, and Sanjoy Roy, Managing Editor of Teamwork Arts, released the cover of Gokhale’s book at two special curtain-raisers in Delhi and Mumbai.

“It was wonderful to have a cover preview of my new novel Jaipur Journals at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai. This was followed by short readings from the book and a deep conversation around writers, the writing process and the magical Jaipur Literature Festival with Sanjoy Roy, the producer of the festival,” says Gokhale, whose debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, published in 1984, has remained a cult classic and has been issued in a double edition with its sequel Priya. 

Gokhale, author of 18 works of fiction and non-fiction, is the founder and co-director of the JLF and of Mountain Echoes, the Bhutan Literature Festival. She is also a director of Yatra Books, a publishing house specialising in translation.