Synopses & Reviews
"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... A sensual, artful dance, powerfully told." 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.
Review
"Shruti Swamy is a writer to celebrate. Her fiction is provocative, precise, and gorgeously inventive." Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
Review
"Lush and poetic." Ms. Magazine
Review
"A saga as rich and gorgeous as Kathak itself." Library Journal
About the Author
Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was longlisted for the Story Prize. Her work has been published by the Paris Review and McSweeney's and anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut novel, The Archer, was published by Algonquin Books in September 2021 and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She lives in San Francisco.