video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player
February 7, 2011

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya reads from The Storyteller of Marrakesh

Details

Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome novelist JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA for an interactive reading from his U.S.-debut novel, The Storyteller of Marrakesh.

Each year, the storyteller, Hassan, gathers listeners to the city square to share their recollections of a young, foreign couple who mysteriously disappeared years earlier. As various witnesses describe their encounters with the couple—their tales overlapping, confirming, and contradicting each other—Hassan hopes to light upon details that will explain what happened to them, and to absolve his own brother, who is in prison for their disappearance.

As testimonies circle an elusive truth, the couple takes on an air as enigmatic as their fate. But is this annual storytelling ritual a genuine attempt to uncover the truth, or is it intended instead to weave an ambiguous mythology around a crime?

“[A] broad, discursive, plausible, and often beguiling presentation of a contemporary Islamic culture little changed by centuries, geopolitics, globalization or religious enmity. Roy-Battacharya’s descriptive powers are acute, and Marrakesh, the Djemaa, the Sahara, and the High Atlas Mountains are vividly rendered through all the senses. In a time when tensions between Islam and the West are fevered, The Storyteller of Marrakesh offers an agreeable change of pace.” — Booklist

About Author(s)

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was born in Jamshedpur, India, and lives in New York. His first novel, The Gabriel Club, was published in eight languages in sixteen countries.