‘Glass Bottom is a beautiful thing; subtle but powerful; prescient; written with great care and elegance and such sensitivity to the richness and strangeness of life’ Sara Baume, author of Seven Steeples and one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023
‘Wondrous, mesmerizing and unique. Sonali Prasad has written a book that is both sensitive and vast―reaching far and wide and bringing it all back together’ Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape
A luminous novel exploring the intricate web of human and natural transformations across time
Gul, Arth, Luni and Himmo live by the sea that bestows as much waste as wonder upon the shores, including, one day, a creature many believe to be a whale. When a storm passes through their small town, the two mother-daughter pairs are pulled into a whirlwind of deep entanglements and hidden desires.
Each of them is forced to confront the turbulence within and around themselves: Gul, tethered to the earth’s seismic murmurs, finds herself unravelling with the weather. Her daughter Arth grapples with the territories of personal and collective memory even as she navigates her complex relationship with her mother. Luni, threading her hopes and fears into her embroidery, tries to find solace amidst the chaos, while her daughter Himmo, drawn to the forbidden ocean, explores where her search and longing might take her. Together, they traverse love, loss and survival as their community teeters on the edge of rupture, with the tempest exposing truths that have long simmered just beneath the surface.
Set against the intractable Arabian Sea, Glass Bottom offers a profound and lyrical meditation on the ordinary and strange places we occupy, and the ties binding us to our planet and to each other, while simultaneously heralding the arrival of a distinctive literary talent.
