The Immortal King Rao: A Novel

by Vauhini Vara

English 388 pages 1 edition

Winner of the 2022 Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for fiction Winner of the 2022 JK Paper-Times of India AutHER Award for Best Debut Shortlisted for the 2022 Tata Literature Live! First Book Award Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction ‘An astonishing debut. An amazing imagination … Thrilling, original, dynamic and ever-surprising.’ -Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni ‘A fully imagined world: propulsive, prophetic, dizzying.’ – Jeet Thayil In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-run government. In a future in which the world is dominated by a Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy – literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts. With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion, and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world’s Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King’s childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the U.S. to study engineering in an economy transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention of the most consequential creation of his life – Athena herself. The Immortal King Rao is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.