all the lives we never lived

War, nationalism, and trees shape lives in unforeseeable ways in this novel about a family and a country struggling with enormous transformations.'In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman' - so begins the story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, who is driven to rebel against tradition and follow her artist's instinct for freedom. Freedom of a different kind is in the air across India. The fight against British rule is reaching a critical turn. The Nazis have come to power in Germany.