Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our gust is Madhuri Vijay, author of The Far Field published by Grove Atlantic on January 15th.

The Far Field is a book of travel, almost in a picaresque manner, the journey of a woman who is an admixture of the good and bad qualities, we all posses but one with who we can emphasize and whose mistakes are mistakes we have all made, sometimes with unfortunate or even tragic consequences. Shalini, our protagonist is privileged and restless, much like the Buddha, who sets out on a journey from her home in cosmopolitan Bangalore to the mountains of Kashmir, a dangerous Kashmir.

She is searching for Bashir Ahmed, a man from her past, who perhaps she loves and perhaps is just a connection between her and her mother, whose tragedy may be the catalyst for this journey.

Throughout the book, Shalini makes lots of choices, some of them with pleasant and kind intention. In fact she always seems to mean well. But some of those choices lead to violent and tragic conclusions.

Some of the people she meets are enemies and some are friends.

It may very well be her naiveté which causes her to make the decisions that she does, but it may be something we as the reader have to figure out ourselves, and as I have said many times before, these are the best of books.