Names of the Women

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Narcopolis, in prose of extraordinary power, a novel about the women whose roles were suppressed, reduced or erased in the Gospels. 'Dazzling, smouldering .

JEET THAYIL was born in 1959 into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, and educated at Jesuit schools in Bombay, Hong Kong and New York. Kerala's Syrian Christians trace their church to St. Thomas, who arrived on the Malabar coast around 50 AD and converted thirteen Hindu families to Christianity, or so tradition has it. Jeet's grandmother, Chachiamma Jacob, was the last of the family who recited from memory the hour-long service in Aramaic, Malayalam and Sanskrit that still defines the faith.