What do you think?
Rate this book
Saraswati
A masterpiece debut novel from one of the UK's most exciting young writers, for fans of David Mitchell, Deepti Kapoor and Zadie Smith.
Centuries ago, the myths say, the holy river Saraswati flowed through what is now Northern India. But when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother's funeral, he is astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks, and Satnam - adrift from his job, girlfriend and flat back in London - soon finds himself swept up in this ferment of Hindu nationalist pride.
As the river alters Satnam's course, so it reveals buried ties to six distant relatives scattered across the globe - from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double - who are brought together in a rapidly changing India. Brimming with love, lush, violence and loss, Gurnaik Johal's magisterial debut deftly animates the passions that bind us to our histories, our lands and each other.
Centuries ago, the myths say, the holy river Saraswati flowed through what is now Northern India. But when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother's funeral, he is astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks, and Satnam - adrift from his job, girlfriend and flat back in London - soon finds himself swept up in this ferment of Hindu nationalist pride.
As the river alters Satnam's course, so it reveals buried ties to six distant relatives scattered across the globe - from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double - who are brought together in a rapidly changing India. Brimming with love, lush, violence and loss, Gurnaik Johal's magisterial debut deftly animates the passions that bind us to our histories, our lands and each other.
384 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 12, 2025
93 people are currently reading
1569 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews
October 5, 2025
More a collection of vaguely interlinked short stories than a novel, this is the work of an author who’s spent all his time learning how to write, but hasn’t yet learned what he wants to say. At nearly 400 pages long, this is an ultimately disappointing and shallow novel, and it is hard to see the point to any of it. Johal occasionally touches on Hindu Nationalist politics, but does not know how to engage with it in any meaningful way (there is another debut novel this year - Quarterlife by Devika Rege - that tackles the same subject in a far superior way) and the characters he creates feel more like vessels for the plot rather than actual flesh-and-blood people. There are also brief flashbacks to a narrative set about 150 years ago which do little to enhance the book, could easily have been taken out, and only serve to add on a few dozen pages to an already overlong novel. By the end I found myself reading it just because I was determined to finish it, but I can’t really say I enjoyed any of it.
June 11, 2025
Best book of 2025 so far! Hard to even describe what this book is - it manages to say so much about Indian mythology / history / culture / Hindu nationalism / archaeology / activism / diaspora ... without forcing it. Sometimes books with multiple stories and characters feel a bit crowded or jumbled but didn't have that at all with this one. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time!
June 17, 2025
Aghhh I'm so conflicted on this. Some of this book is fantastic, some of it drags like a sprained ankle. I'm struggling to justify giving it four stars, because reading it felt like a marathon that required wading through quicksand every other mile, but three feels cruel, because I admire what is being attempted and partially realised. I think on a technical level this is an excellent piece of writing, on a conceptual level this is incredible, on a political level this is an exquisite puzzle box of moving parts and clashing perspectives, and on a character-writing level I was left wanting.
In a book which features so many protagonists - I would try to count them off, but I'd forget some, so I'll just safely say it's more than seven - you're asking the reader to balance many plates to maintain a grasp on the plot, and that requires seriously accomplished character-writing, which I think is Johal's weakest facet here. For me, at least. I felt very distant from a majority of the narrators; I was excited for the first chapter, because Satnam as a character really landed and I loved the collision between his idealistic, poetic view of the world and the insidious politics he seems to deliberately ignore the rise of in order to maintain this view. When his narrative ended abruptly and the momentum suddenly tanked to establish some ancient family lore, the wind went out of my sails and I struggled to pick Saraswati back up for a week. I ended up switching to the audiobook because I was genuinely interested in the plot, but the prose is endless and meandering.
I understand each decision which was made in the conceptualisation of this book. I understand why there were seven key protagonists, why they all had to be linked by family, why the story so often veered into the distant past and why so much ground is covered between each of these plot lines. I think to have done a project of this scale justice would require a page count on the level of War and Peace, which would have been an even harder sell to publishers for a debut author. So I don't even know if I'd blame the author for this falling a little flat for me - a reader who is less character-driven and more interested in worldbuilding would get a lifetime of entertainment from Saraswati.
The segments of this book that I most enjoyed were, oddly, the chapters which explored toxic masculine Andrew Tate-type rhetoric. Satnam getting swept up in a presidential campaign for a politician whose main gripe seems to be with 'beta soyboys ruining this country' was riveting to watch unfold. The part which featured a fictionalised proxy of every 'back to ancestry' manosphere bodybuilding freak, but reminded me specifically of the Liver King (the caveman diet in the book being pretty much a one-to-one mirror of Mr. Liver's 'primal lifestyle'), was laugh-out-loud funny ('I wanted He-Man and I got a he/himbo'... I stood up and clapped) and absolutely dead-on with how seemingly 'normal' unassuming men get dragged into weird misogynistic echo-chambers, and how so much of this kind of idealistic 'return to your roots' rhetoric is a pipeline straight into alt-right politics. This is something I have yet to see written so well from a male perspective, which is why the pivot away from Satnam disheartened me so much. I would love to see a novel from Gurnaik Johal exploring something like this in the future.
That's the thing - Johal's writing, when allowed to flourish, is excellent! When a character has enough space to expand, they are endearing, or exasperating, or enthralling. And the way the political ramifications of this resurfacing river are explored through the text is brilliant! I don't think this concept could be pared down at all, but I still think it's trying to do too much. Unbelievably ambitious in a way which is sort of impossible to fulfil entirely. So I didn't particularly enjoy reading this, and I don't even know if I'd recommend it to someone unless I knew them to have exceptional stamina, but I leave Saraswati with a lot of admiration for and interest in the author. I think I will give this four stars, after all. I'll be waiting with bated breath for anything Johal puts out in the future. With this huge concept written, edited and released into the world, I hope he takes the opportunity to scale down, because that's where I think the bulk of his talent lies.
In a book which features so many protagonists - I would try to count them off, but I'd forget some, so I'll just safely say it's more than seven - you're asking the reader to balance many plates to maintain a grasp on the plot, and that requires seriously accomplished character-writing, which I think is Johal's weakest facet here. For me, at least. I felt very distant from a majority of the narrators; I was excited for the first chapter, because Satnam as a character really landed and I loved the collision between his idealistic, poetic view of the world and the insidious politics he seems to deliberately ignore the rise of in order to maintain this view. When his narrative ended abruptly and the momentum suddenly tanked to establish some ancient family lore, the wind went out of my sails and I struggled to pick Saraswati back up for a week. I ended up switching to the audiobook because I was genuinely interested in the plot, but the prose is endless and meandering.
I understand each decision which was made in the conceptualisation of this book. I understand why there were seven key protagonists, why they all had to be linked by family, why the story so often veered into the distant past and why so much ground is covered between each of these plot lines. I think to have done a project of this scale justice would require a page count on the level of War and Peace, which would have been an even harder sell to publishers for a debut author. So I don't even know if I'd blame the author for this falling a little flat for me - a reader who is less character-driven and more interested in worldbuilding would get a lifetime of entertainment from Saraswati.
The segments of this book that I most enjoyed were, oddly, the chapters which explored toxic masculine Andrew Tate-type rhetoric. Satnam getting swept up in a presidential campaign for a politician whose main gripe seems to be with 'beta soyboys ruining this country' was riveting to watch unfold. The part which featured a fictionalised proxy of every 'back to ancestry' manosphere bodybuilding freak, but reminded me specifically of the Liver King (the caveman diet in the book being pretty much a one-to-one mirror of Mr. Liver's 'primal lifestyle'), was laugh-out-loud funny ('I wanted He-Man and I got a he/himbo'... I stood up and clapped) and absolutely dead-on with how seemingly 'normal' unassuming men get dragged into weird misogynistic echo-chambers, and how so much of this kind of idealistic 'return to your roots' rhetoric is a pipeline straight into alt-right politics. This is something I have yet to see written so well from a male perspective, which is why the pivot away from Satnam disheartened me so much. I would love to see a novel from Gurnaik Johal exploring something like this in the future.
That's the thing - Johal's writing, when allowed to flourish, is excellent! When a character has enough space to expand, they are endearing, or exasperating, or enthralling. And the way the political ramifications of this resurfacing river are explored through the text is brilliant! I don't think this concept could be pared down at all, but I still think it's trying to do too much. Unbelievably ambitious in a way which is sort of impossible to fulfil entirely. So I didn't particularly enjoy reading this, and I don't even know if I'd recommend it to someone unless I knew them to have exceptional stamina, but I leave Saraswati with a lot of admiration for and interest in the author. I think I will give this four stars, after all. I'll be waiting with bated breath for anything Johal puts out in the future. With this huge concept written, edited and released into the world, I hope he takes the opportunity to scale down, because that's where I think the bulk of his talent lies.
June 21, 2025
3.5 ⭐️
August 10, 2025
A very ambitious book, covering a lot of ground. At one level, it is a story of an Indian family and its spread across the world over multiple generations. I'm sure that the author meant this to be a bit of an allegory of the Indian diaspora. At another level, it's the story of the toxic Indian nationalism infecting all discourse in India, and claiming countless lives in the process. It's also the story of water and how rivers shape fates of people and nations, and how, when politically expedient, they can form the basis of nationalistic narratives. Finally, it's the story of Indian origin people navigating their lives, wherever they are geographically, dealing with somewhat similar challenges related to a profound sense of displacement.
I liked the book overall - it's well written, and reads a bit like a crime novel. There is a mystery to unravel, and unraveling it makes the reader want to delve deeper into the lives of the protagonists, understanding why they are the way they are, and what led them there. These mini narratives about the protagonists can be read almost like short novellas that intertwine to create the story (and the cloth that holds the book together, in a way). These novellas are punchy and interesting in their own right.
However, I did find the book a bit disorganised. It's almost like the author bit more than he could chew - there are loose storylines, themes that never get fully explored, and relationships that we only see glimpses of. It feels like the author had so many great ideas that he couldn't hold himself back from forcing them all into this one book. It does feel like there is probably material here to cover at least two or three more books, if these were well developed and properly fleshed out.
I'd recommend to anyone interested in contemporary India and its nationalistic currents. The reader will enjoy it and will come out with a few strong impressions. Just don't expect this to be a work of art - it's a good book that is moderately well written, but it's not Rohinton Mistry or Rabindranath Tagore.
I liked the book overall - it's well written, and reads a bit like a crime novel. There is a mystery to unravel, and unraveling it makes the reader want to delve deeper into the lives of the protagonists, understanding why they are the way they are, and what led them there. These mini narratives about the protagonists can be read almost like short novellas that intertwine to create the story (and the cloth that holds the book together, in a way). These novellas are punchy and interesting in their own right.
However, I did find the book a bit disorganised. It's almost like the author bit more than he could chew - there are loose storylines, themes that never get fully explored, and relationships that we only see glimpses of. It feels like the author had so many great ideas that he couldn't hold himself back from forcing them all into this one book. It does feel like there is probably material here to cover at least two or three more books, if these were well developed and properly fleshed out.
I'd recommend to anyone interested in contemporary India and its nationalistic currents. The reader will enjoy it and will come out with a few strong impressions. Just don't expect this to be a work of art - it's a good book that is moderately well written, but it's not Rohinton Mistry or Rabindranath Tagore.
July 30, 2025
This started well, but quickly became unreadable-- too many threads that did not cohere. Characterisation was drowned by thematic bilge. Gurniak Johal previous work was a collection of prize-winning short stories. Saraswati felt like a collection of ideas that would not cohere into a whole. A lot of trees and now wood, or maybe a lot of currents and no river.
September 14, 2025
2.5
This didn't really work for me. As an underground river in India, Saraswati, resurfaces, multiple characters meet, we get a few timelines, family secrets are uncovered.... It's nothing I normally dislike but I found there were too many characters, none of them were very likeable, the plot was too messy and hard to follow at times, and a lot of the violence felt gratuitous. It was well written otherwise but just not for me.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
This didn't really work for me. As an underground river in India, Saraswati, resurfaces, multiple characters meet, we get a few timelines, family secrets are uncovered.... It's nothing I normally dislike but I found there were too many characters, none of them were very likeable, the plot was too messy and hard to follow at times, and a lot of the violence felt gratuitous. It was well written otherwise but just not for me.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
July 14, 2025
Book Review: Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal
Gurnaik Johal’s Saraswati is an ambitious and richly layered novel, composed of seven interconnected stories. Remarkably, this is only Johal’s second book—his debut was We Move—and yet he writes with a maturity and literary confidence well beyond his years.
Each chapter is named after a river—Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum, Indus, and Saraswati—evoking the historic rivers of the Punjab and their cultural significance. These chapters not only map the geography of a region but also the emotional and ancestral terrain of its people. Running through the book is the haunting question: Is revival a form of progress? By invoking these rivers, especially the mythical Saraswati, Johal seems to invite us to reflect on memory, myth, loss, and continuity.
At the heart of the novel is Satnam, a British-Indian man who returns to his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral. There, a mysterious event occurs—the reappearance of a long-dry well that begins to fill with water, believed by villagers to be the river Saraswati. This symbolic revival prompts deeper questions about identity, belonging, and the stories we inherit.
Each chapter weaves in legendary qissas—classic love tales like Heer-Ranjha, Sassi-Punnu, and Mirza-Sahiban—paralleled with contemporary stories of characters who are, knowingly or unknowingly, linked. Johal draws on elements like phulkari, oral storytelling traditions, and the textures of everyday life to bridge past and present, legend and realism.
The novel is beautifully researched and deeply evocative, but it isn’t a straightforward read. The narrative meanders like a river—sometimes flowing gently, at other times unpredictably shifting course. The sheer number of characters and their interconnections can feel overwhelming, and I found myself flipping back to keep track. However, this complexity also mirrors the way memory and history operate—non-linear and layered.
Each character brings a distinct voice and perspective, enriching the mosaic of the novel. Johal doesn’t offer easy resolutions; instead, he challenges the reader to question what we think we know about ancestry, identity, and home.
Saraswati is a rewarding read for fans of literary fiction, folklore enthusiasts, diaspora narratives, and those who enjoy satire and multi-layered storytelling. It takes some effort to read, but the story and message make it totally worth it.
Gurnaik Johal’s Saraswati is an ambitious and richly layered novel, composed of seven interconnected stories. Remarkably, this is only Johal’s second book—his debut was We Move—and yet he writes with a maturity and literary confidence well beyond his years.
Each chapter is named after a river—Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum, Indus, and Saraswati—evoking the historic rivers of the Punjab and their cultural significance. These chapters not only map the geography of a region but also the emotional and ancestral terrain of its people. Running through the book is the haunting question: Is revival a form of progress? By invoking these rivers, especially the mythical Saraswati, Johal seems to invite us to reflect on memory, myth, loss, and continuity.
At the heart of the novel is Satnam, a British-Indian man who returns to his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral. There, a mysterious event occurs—the reappearance of a long-dry well that begins to fill with water, believed by villagers to be the river Saraswati. This symbolic revival prompts deeper questions about identity, belonging, and the stories we inherit.
Each chapter weaves in legendary qissas—classic love tales like Heer-Ranjha, Sassi-Punnu, and Mirza-Sahiban—paralleled with contemporary stories of characters who are, knowingly or unknowingly, linked. Johal draws on elements like phulkari, oral storytelling traditions, and the textures of everyday life to bridge past and present, legend and realism.
The novel is beautifully researched and deeply evocative, but it isn’t a straightforward read. The narrative meanders like a river—sometimes flowing gently, at other times unpredictably shifting course. The sheer number of characters and their interconnections can feel overwhelming, and I found myself flipping back to keep track. However, this complexity also mirrors the way memory and history operate—non-linear and layered.
Each character brings a distinct voice and perspective, enriching the mosaic of the novel. Johal doesn’t offer easy resolutions; instead, he challenges the reader to question what we think we know about ancestry, identity, and home.
Saraswati is a rewarding read for fans of literary fiction, folklore enthusiasts, diaspora narratives, and those who enjoy satire and multi-layered storytelling. It takes some effort to read, but the story and message make it totally worth it.
July 24, 2025
There were parts of this that I loved and parts that I really didn't like. I think the overarching story was excellent and the different perspectives tied together really well in the end. However occasionally the execution was off for me. the writing style felt a little inconsistent - It'd go from beautiful prose to excessively long run-on sentences (sometimes a page long) to modern references that dint feel like they were needed (was not expecting a minecraft reference). But who am I to judge? I couldn't write anything of this scale, this really was a story of epic proportions, so props to the author!
August 12, 2025
*3.5-4 stars*
I picked this book up from a little bookshop in Noosa and was completely drawn in by the back cover description, the mystery of Satnam's family heritage and the spiritual symbolism of the ancient Saraswati river.
It all sounded fascinating, however in reality the storyline took on a much more complex scope with myriad of characters, all with their own unique stories and I found myself interested but at the same time confused by who was who and what their connection was to the original character Satnam. I wanted to know more of Satnam and what happened to his initial intrigue about his ancestors and family line connection to the ancient river that flowed underneath his newly inherited property. Also his love life that was alluded to in the opening chapters.
This is an intriguing piece of literature and written extremely well (I admit I may not be clever enough to have absorbed it's brilliance!) but I felt it could be more likened to a collection of short stories with a common theme than an all-encompassing novel.
I picked this book up from a little bookshop in Noosa and was completely drawn in by the back cover description, the mystery of Satnam's family heritage and the spiritual symbolism of the ancient Saraswati river.
It all sounded fascinating, however in reality the storyline took on a much more complex scope with myriad of characters, all with their own unique stories and I found myself interested but at the same time confused by who was who and what their connection was to the original character Satnam. I wanted to know more of Satnam and what happened to his initial intrigue about his ancestors and family line connection to the ancient river that flowed underneath his newly inherited property. Also his love life that was alluded to in the opening chapters.
This is an intriguing piece of literature and written extremely well (I admit I may not be clever enough to have absorbed it's brilliance!) but I felt it could be more likened to a collection of short stories with a common theme than an all-encompassing novel.
June 2, 2025
I really struggled to follow this and didn't find it enjoyable because of that. Just not for me!
July 26, 2025
I started off feeling like this would be a five-star read for me. I revelled in the story of an ancient river coming alive and the things that happen as a result. And the parallel plot of discovering one's ancestry across generations, bringing the Indian diaspora alive, from Mauritius to Kenya to Vancouver and even Singapore (where I come from).
But after the first two hundred pages, the book started to make me feel a little tired, trying to keep up with all their characters and their link to the ancestral thread.
I love the idea of the book, but I do feel that the writer was trying to cover too much. There were passages that read like stream of consciousness writing, which ended up feeling more like an information dump. I felt occasionally overwhelmed.
Even so, this is a wonderful first novel for the author; all the ingredients of a great story is there. Just that perhaps it could have been a little tighter.
But after the first two hundred pages, the book started to make me feel a little tired, trying to keep up with all their characters and their link to the ancestral thread.
I love the idea of the book, but I do feel that the writer was trying to cover too much. There were passages that read like stream of consciousness writing, which ended up feeling more like an information dump. I felt occasionally overwhelmed.
Even so, this is a wonderful first novel for the author; all the ingredients of a great story is there. Just that perhaps it could have been a little tighter.
April 1, 2025
Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal is a deeply ambitious, epic tale which is yet intimate and beautiful. There are seven stories here which span the globe but all of which connect back to India. Early reviews have compared this to David Mitchell, Eleanor Catton and Zadie Smith - this gives an indication of how incredibly well written Saraswati is. Gurnaik Johal is definitely one to watch. If at times the novel feels like it is over-reaching, or becoming too ambitious to contains itself, Johal masterfully brings it back from the brink, and back to something human and real. I very much loved reading this novel, and will definitely be watching out for more from it's author.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
October 27, 2025
Picked this up when I saw it was on the Waterstones 'best debut' shortlist and I have to say it absolutely BLEW ME AWAY. It's a hard book to describe, such is its ambition, but I suppose the best way to sum it up is by saying it's like if Ben Lerner wrote CLOUD ATLAS and filled it with incredibly rich, nuanced and hilarious Indian characters spread across the globe. An absolute masterpiece and I cannot WAIT to see how this young writer's career will blossom (I will be picking up a copy of Johal's much-lauded story collection ASAP)!
April 6, 2025
In some places this was a four and in some it was a three, so I’d probably come out as three and a half?
He’s a compelling storyteller and it did all come together in the end, but I never really connected to any of the characters and frequently found myself confused and frustrated.
He’s a compelling storyteller and it did all come together in the end, but I never really connected to any of the characters and frequently found myself confused and frustrated.
June 6, 2025
It's good. It's just not my cup of tea. If you like literary books then this is right up your alley!
December 19, 2025
If I were to sum up Gurnaik Johal's debut novel, Saraswati, in a sentence, it would be - realism and allegory collapsing into each other yielding a hypernationalist myopia of New India transforming into Bharat. The disjointed, elusive pigeonholing, transgressive imploding of spatio-temporality reeks of Murakami, characteristic of what Douglas Coupland calls 'translit', a genre much associated, albeit namelessly, in the corpus of Thomas Pynchon and Roberto Bolano. Johal fictionalizes history, cartography (though geography is dealt with respectfully) by way of familial threads transcontinentally. The temporal switches offer a medley traversing spaces from Earth's northernmost inhabited place, Svalbard, to the African Rift Valley in Kenya, from the burning sands of the Thar & the Rann of Kutch to the frigid deserts of Tibet, from the port city of Vancouver in Canada to the city state of Singapore, and all of it terminating around the inconspicuous Hakra village in Punjab. The novel is centrifugal and centripetal at the same time, before moving the full circle culminating in a vision that truly divides the ideological spectrum in a fragile present, we are all witness to. In other words, Saraswati bristles with the underlying political satire.
The Vedic Saraswati, often considered to be the greatest river, surpassing the mighty Indus and Ganga is the cradle of civilization, and carries the spiritual aspirations of adepts from its source at Kailash Mansarovar to its mouth at the Arabian Sea. The river disappeared, or rather Puranically, escaped the gaze of Brahma by going underground. While the source of the Vedic Saraswati had been proven to lie at the foothills of the Shivaliks in Haryana, the river confluences with the Ghaggar. This latitude of error is acceptable in a fictionalized form, which the author does not seem to mind. Then suddenly the waters of the river start surfacing overground, through a well of a Londoner's patch of land in Punjab. Three plot begins to unfold. The main protagonists are Sejal and Jugaad, whose seven children are named after Sapta-Sindhu, the seven rivers of Punjab. These two live in a different time zone, whose descendants are eventually united by a journalist, a third-person impersonation of Johal himself. The fabric of this unity is phulkari (an embroidered cloth or a shawl), which was cut into seven pieces meant for seven children who would pass on the legacy to their offsprings and on and on.
Little do these characters know that they are getting sucked into the jingoistic hyperbole, where reinventing the past more than rediscovering it is a break much desired. This is a break from the established scheme in order to stamp Bharat's indelible mark as the pinnacle of civilization that was unjustly taken away by invaders from the west. No prizes in guessing here! Why should the ancient civilization still be called the Indus Valley Civilization, when most of the Archaeological sites sit in the Saraswati Basin? So, its Saraswatian Civilization, and the ancient port city of Lothal needs to be rebuilt as New Lothal at the place where the river meets the sea. This New Lothal needs to be inaugurated on the day of Basant Panchami by the Prime Minister, "Narayan Indra" (try saying that quickly and your guess becomes as good as any other's). And on the day of inauguration, a stampede by the newly constructed (read artificial) Ghat takes a massive toll on human lives, but as is wont, the show went on. As Sting sings,
All this time
the river flowed
endlessly to the sea
One way to strike through the name Indus in the civilization is to abrogate the treaty with the neighbour, a fact religiously carried out in the wake of the terror attack in Pahalgam in India's J&K. The novel takes on prescient proportions here, for realism and symbolism pass fluidly into each other, with the latter treated in a heavy-handed manner, a definitive Clifford Geertzian or Victor Turnerian manner. But symbolism does have its realistic tangents, be they rinderpest infection in cattle population, stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, cow vigilantism and the tendency to confuse bulls with cows, a key driver of fundamentalist mercenarism, and a rhetoric that goes on a tailspin more often than not.
That the narrative is breezy is a big plus in this 'translit' work, and the Punjabi folktales or qisses add flavour, as these help suture individual chapters internally, more than extraneously. Johal is to be watched out for.
The Vedic Saraswati, often considered to be the greatest river, surpassing the mighty Indus and Ganga is the cradle of civilization, and carries the spiritual aspirations of adepts from its source at Kailash Mansarovar to its mouth at the Arabian Sea. The river disappeared, or rather Puranically, escaped the gaze of Brahma by going underground. While the source of the Vedic Saraswati had been proven to lie at the foothills of the Shivaliks in Haryana, the river confluences with the Ghaggar. This latitude of error is acceptable in a fictionalized form, which the author does not seem to mind. Then suddenly the waters of the river start surfacing overground, through a well of a Londoner's patch of land in Punjab. Three plot begins to unfold. The main protagonists are Sejal and Jugaad, whose seven children are named after Sapta-Sindhu, the seven rivers of Punjab. These two live in a different time zone, whose descendants are eventually united by a journalist, a third-person impersonation of Johal himself. The fabric of this unity is phulkari (an embroidered cloth or a shawl), which was cut into seven pieces meant for seven children who would pass on the legacy to their offsprings and on and on.
Little do these characters know that they are getting sucked into the jingoistic hyperbole, where reinventing the past more than rediscovering it is a break much desired. This is a break from the established scheme in order to stamp Bharat's indelible mark as the pinnacle of civilization that was unjustly taken away by invaders from the west. No prizes in guessing here! Why should the ancient civilization still be called the Indus Valley Civilization, when most of the Archaeological sites sit in the Saraswati Basin? So, its Saraswatian Civilization, and the ancient port city of Lothal needs to be rebuilt as New Lothal at the place where the river meets the sea. This New Lothal needs to be inaugurated on the day of Basant Panchami by the Prime Minister, "Narayan Indra" (try saying that quickly and your guess becomes as good as any other's). And on the day of inauguration, a stampede by the newly constructed (read artificial) Ghat takes a massive toll on human lives, but as is wont, the show went on. As Sting sings,
All this time
the river flowed
endlessly to the sea
One way to strike through the name Indus in the civilization is to abrogate the treaty with the neighbour, a fact religiously carried out in the wake of the terror attack in Pahalgam in India's J&K. The novel takes on prescient proportions here, for realism and symbolism pass fluidly into each other, with the latter treated in a heavy-handed manner, a definitive Clifford Geertzian or Victor Turnerian manner. But symbolism does have its realistic tangents, be they rinderpest infection in cattle population, stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, cow vigilantism and the tendency to confuse bulls with cows, a key driver of fundamentalist mercenarism, and a rhetoric that goes on a tailspin more often than not.
That the narrative is breezy is a big plus in this 'translit' work, and the Punjabi folktales or qisses add flavour, as these help suture individual chapters internally, more than extraneously. Johal is to be watched out for.
February 23, 2026
Shortlisted for the 2025 Sunday Times Young Writer Award
Longlisted for 2026 Author’s Club First Nobel Award
Shortlisted for the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize
This book featured in the 2025 version of the influential and frequently literary-prize-prescient annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (last year included Colin Barrett and Kaliane Bradley, 2023 Tom Crewe. Michael Magee and Jacqueline Crooks – and earlier years have featured Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others).
The author has previously published a short story collection “We Move” (2022) based in his birthplace of Northolt, West London, the first one of which “Arrival” won the 2022 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Award and can be found here (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/7-ssp-...).
In his Observer article about this collection – he says “Often when a short story writer does a novel, it feels as if they’ve diluted a short story over a larger page count …… I wanted this to be a maximalist book that earned its RRP.” and its fair to say he more than delivered on this – compared to the extremely narrow geographic boundaries (and at least based on the one I have read the tight writing) of his short stories this one sprawls across the world – centred very much in Punjab but taking in for example Canada and Diego Garcia.
And for once a blurb – here comparing to among others David Mitchell and Eleanor Catton – also delivers: with the integrated interconnected characters and structure of both writers (particularly earlier Mitchell).
The novel is set in a near future with climate change and particularly water shortages more acute than even now (although the author found as he wrote it that the present kept capturing up with his near future) and with intra- and international disputes over water rights growing.
It is told in seven successive chapters –each featuring one of the descendants of one of the children of Sejal and Jugaad (the names of the characters in a Punjabi Qissi/Fable but here – as we discover in their story which is interleaved with the longer chapters - a couple from the late 19th Century, Sejal a gifted seamstress and Jugaad a Chamar who flees and becomes a boatman, both united not just in their love for each other but in their love of storytelling). The children were each named after the Five Rivers of the Punjab (Sutlej, Bease, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum), the sixth after the transboundary Indus river, with a seventh chapter named Saraswati after the mythological river believed to have gone underground.
The first chapter opens with the story of Satnam ��� following the death of his Bibi (grandmother) he has travelled from his home of Wolverhampton to the drought ridden family farm which she moved back to in the Punjab and makes a hugely unexpected discovery of water – water which is quickly identified by government officials and priests as evidence that the Saraswati has returned. While excitement about the discovery – which is the first of copious appearances of water – grows and is linked both to historical beliefs of an ancient Saraswati civilisation which is co-opted by an ambitious army General with political ambitions, Satnam himself, a very passive character, finds himself drifting into a role as a heavy for the nascent Saraswati movement, putting the frighteners on farmers who will not sell up their land to allow the river to be rediscovered.
We then switch to Katrina – who we pick up in Diego Garcia (in the Chagos Islands) – she is a specialist in advanced pest control, in particular dealing with the infamous Yellow Crazy Ant. Part way through we switch to a first party viewpoint with an unnamed narrator – a feature writer working on an article about Sejal and Jugaad who she has “recently discovered were not only real people who had actually existed, but they were people to whom I was related” and using a genetic mapping app is starting to trace fellow descendants – and the two end up on a pilgrimage.
In turn:
Nathu is an archaeologist – drawn back by a lover of his wife (in an open/asexual marriage) to help with a Rosetta Stone for the Saraswati civilisation.
Gyan once a singer in a one-hit wonder band is now an ecological activist – we first meet her taking part in the sabotage of a logging operation in Canada
Harsimran is a stunt double then reality TV participant but is now on a religiously charged trial for the killing of a bull in a car accident involving the actor that he stood in for.
Mussafir – a teenage hustler is desperately trying to cross the border from Pakistan to India (closed due to a burgeoning water dispute) to attend the premiere of a film in which his idol Arushi (a singer who is theaded across the stories) plays the goddess Saraswati (the actor for which Harsiman stands in has a part) – and gets inadvertently involved in a cow-delivered biological terrorist attack.
In all of the stories the same first party voice researching the family breaks in and the last story is theirs pulling the previous stories together in a dramatic climax, perhaps also explaining how the story was put together and who for.
And as I said the story of Sejal and Jugaad is also interleaved between the chapters – their sections also typically including other fables and legends that they tell each other or others tell them to satisfy their love of stories and the last chapter both explains the narrator and her descendant’s connection to the other six river-named children, but also gives us the origins of Sejal and Jugaad as a fable.
Against all of this a number of themes and ideas recur:
In family terms: the diaspora of Sejal and Jugaad’s children and their families (whose later generations we are now reading about); some pieces of red cloth divided up among them by Sejal and further sub-divided by subsequent generations of women among their children – and another group of phulkari dupatta (embroidered scarfs I think) with a line of gold thread and seeming to correspond to where each of the children ended up.
Politically: the increasingly militant Saraswati nationalist movement; water disputes; rising tensions around the world from environmental degradation (there are some bravura passages in which the author rather draws away from what is an action lead narrative).
And narratively everything from desperate car crashes to dam collapses to catastrophic crowd crush.
Really this is an impressive debut – one which as I said earlier definitely lives up to the author’s maximalist aims and does live up to the David Mitchell/Eleanor Catton comparison.
It is also one I would like to revisit in hardcopy when published (as I think its length and its web of connections is more suited to that format) and I expect to have the opportunity to do so in future as I see it appearing on a number of prize lists – but particularly the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize (in fact I recommended it to the Prize organiser at the 2025 winner ceremony).
My thanks to Serpent’s Tail/Viper/Profile Books for an ARC via NetGalley
Longlisted for 2026 Author’s Club First Nobel Award
Shortlisted for the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize
If she hadn’t run out of thread, if her sister wasn’t getting married, if River Baba hadn’t died, Sejal might not have met Jugaad. And if the clouds hadn’t arrived, and the rain hadn’t fallen, if the fate of the village hadn’t changed, maybe nothing would have passed between them. All the generations after them, all those branches, it was all down to two people meeting, beginning to talk. It was the same old story for everyone, a dream of a story that doesn’t end, that always changes, a pattern large enough to hold everything within it.
This book featured in the 2025 version of the influential and frequently literary-prize-prescient annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (last year included Colin Barrett and Kaliane Bradley, 2023 Tom Crewe. Michael Magee and Jacqueline Crooks – and earlier years have featured Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others).
The author has previously published a short story collection “We Move” (2022) based in his birthplace of Northolt, West London, the first one of which “Arrival” won the 2022 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Award and can be found here (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/7-ssp-...).
In his Observer article about this collection – he says “Often when a short story writer does a novel, it feels as if they’ve diluted a short story over a larger page count …… I wanted this to be a maximalist book that earned its RRP.” and its fair to say he more than delivered on this – compared to the extremely narrow geographic boundaries (and at least based on the one I have read the tight writing) of his short stories this one sprawls across the world – centred very much in Punjab but taking in for example Canada and Diego Garcia.
And for once a blurb – here comparing to among others David Mitchell and Eleanor Catton – also delivers: with the integrated interconnected characters and structure of both writers (particularly earlier Mitchell).
The novel is set in a near future with climate change and particularly water shortages more acute than even now (although the author found as he wrote it that the present kept capturing up with his near future) and with intra- and international disputes over water rights growing.
It is told in seven successive chapters –each featuring one of the descendants of one of the children of Sejal and Jugaad (the names of the characters in a Punjabi Qissi/Fable but here – as we discover in their story which is interleaved with the longer chapters - a couple from the late 19th Century, Sejal a gifted seamstress and Jugaad a Chamar who flees and becomes a boatman, both united not just in their love for each other but in their love of storytelling). The children were each named after the Five Rivers of the Punjab (Sutlej, Bease, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum), the sixth after the transboundary Indus river, with a seventh chapter named Saraswati after the mythological river believed to have gone underground.
The first chapter opens with the story of Satnam ��� following the death of his Bibi (grandmother) he has travelled from his home of Wolverhampton to the drought ridden family farm which she moved back to in the Punjab and makes a hugely unexpected discovery of water – water which is quickly identified by government officials and priests as evidence that the Saraswati has returned. While excitement about the discovery – which is the first of copious appearances of water – grows and is linked both to historical beliefs of an ancient Saraswati civilisation which is co-opted by an ambitious army General with political ambitions, Satnam himself, a very passive character, finds himself drifting into a role as a heavy for the nascent Saraswati movement, putting the frighteners on farmers who will not sell up their land to allow the river to be rediscovered.
We then switch to Katrina – who we pick up in Diego Garcia (in the Chagos Islands) – she is a specialist in advanced pest control, in particular dealing with the infamous Yellow Crazy Ant. Part way through we switch to a first party viewpoint with an unnamed narrator – a feature writer working on an article about Sejal and Jugaad who she has “recently discovered were not only real people who had actually existed, but they were people to whom I was related” and using a genetic mapping app is starting to trace fellow descendants – and the two end up on a pilgrimage.
In turn:
Nathu is an archaeologist – drawn back by a lover of his wife (in an open/asexual marriage) to help with a Rosetta Stone for the Saraswati civilisation.
Gyan once a singer in a one-hit wonder band is now an ecological activist – we first meet her taking part in the sabotage of a logging operation in Canada
Harsimran is a stunt double then reality TV participant but is now on a religiously charged trial for the killing of a bull in a car accident involving the actor that he stood in for.
Mussafir – a teenage hustler is desperately trying to cross the border from Pakistan to India (closed due to a burgeoning water dispute) to attend the premiere of a film in which his idol Arushi (a singer who is theaded across the stories) plays the goddess Saraswati (the actor for which Harsiman stands in has a part) – and gets inadvertently involved in a cow-delivered biological terrorist attack.
In all of the stories the same first party voice researching the family breaks in and the last story is theirs pulling the previous stories together in a dramatic climax, perhaps also explaining how the story was put together and who for.
And as I said the story of Sejal and Jugaad is also interleaved between the chapters – their sections also typically including other fables and legends that they tell each other or others tell them to satisfy their love of stories and the last chapter both explains the narrator and her descendant’s connection to the other six river-named children, but also gives us the origins of Sejal and Jugaad as a fable.
Against all of this a number of themes and ideas recur:
In family terms: the diaspora of Sejal and Jugaad’s children and their families (whose later generations we are now reading about); some pieces of red cloth divided up among them by Sejal and further sub-divided by subsequent generations of women among their children – and another group of phulkari dupatta (embroidered scarfs I think) with a line of gold thread and seeming to correspond to where each of the children ended up.
The first was green and yellow, the pattern showing crops, fields. The second was patterned around circular rings rather than a grid, and the third was less detailed: several blue lines weaved together on white cotton, all meeting at one end of the piece, the way the branches of a tree meet its trunk. Satnam’s mum unpegged the cloth and turned it upside down, the branches roots: seven rivers coming from one source. The fourth was made up of the colours of fire, while the fifth was completely white. Up close, he could see a white cow stitched at its centre, four white streams of milk coming from her udders. The sixth had an abstract pattern that looked like hair, and the seventh, which seemed unfinished, showed the beginnings of a spiderweb. In each piece there was a line of gold thread, but other than that one detail there was such a variance of colour and style that they might have been made by different people.
Politically: the increasingly militant Saraswati nationalist movement; water disputes; rising tensions around the world from environmental degradation (there are some bravura passages in which the author rather draws away from what is an action lead narrative).
And narratively everything from desperate car crashes to dam collapses to catastrophic crowd crush.
Really this is an impressive debut – one which as I said earlier definitely lives up to the author’s maximalist aims and does live up to the David Mitchell/Eleanor Catton comparison.
It is also one I would like to revisit in hardcopy when published (as I think its length and its web of connections is more suited to that format) and I expect to have the opportunity to do so in future as I see it appearing on a number of prize lists – but particularly the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize (in fact I recommended it to the Prize organiser at the 2025 winner ceremony).
My thanks to Serpent’s Tail/Viper/Profile Books for an ARC via NetGalley
It was good material, he thought, as he cycled, usable material, and he couldn’t help but translate the real history of their lives into a story that would engage an audience. A couple defying the wills of their parents and eloping, only to raise children who’d grow up not just to defy them, but to leave them. Their love posed in opposition to the world. Their seven children bound for far-off lands–that was current, he thought, that was new.
October 27, 2025
Gurnaik Johal’s novel Saraswati is divided into seven chapters, each named after a river of north-western India: Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum, Indus, Saraswati. Each chapter begins with an epigraph, and the one that heads Jhelum is the shortest. Just three words, and its slightly longer translation. Crescat e fluviis, ‘Strength from the rivers’, the motto of British Punjab.
It is a motto singularly apt for the book itself, a sprawling story of a family that begins in Punjab, spreads out across the world, and then circles back to Punjab. The story begins on a river, is tied up inextricably with rivers, and ends at the river for which it is named: the Saraswati. In between the beginning and the end are tales that, river-like, rise and fall, go here and there. Are tied to the earth, and are always, eventually, about strength, of whatever kind.
Saraswati begins with British-born Satnam returning to his ancestral village in Punjab with his parents following his grandmother’s death. As part of her legacy, Satnam’s Bibi has left a farm, as well as seven hand-embroidered phulkaris, which Satnam finds intriguing. Even as his parents wind up their work in Punjab and return to the UK, Satnam stays on, unable to break loose. The well on the farm begins to fill up with water, and when scholars and scientists investigate, they come to the conclusion that this is the long-submerged Saraswati, coming to life again. The river rises, and with it rises a frenzy of Hindu nationalism, invoking the sacred river and using it to garner public approval.
From Satnam, the tale moves back more than a century, to 1878. During a famine, a young woman named Sejal accompanies her sister, a bride, across the river to the sister’s new home. The old boatman has been replaced by a young man named Jugaad, and the chemistry between Sejal and Jugaad is instant. Their love story is the foundation of the novel: Sejal and Jugaad marry, much against the wishes of her family, and they name their children after the rivers of their land.
It is the descendants of these people whose stories form the intertwining threads of the main narrative. There is Satnam, of course. And Mauritius-born Katrina, trekking to Mount Kailash in an attempt to fulfil a desire of her late husband. There is Gyan, musician and underground saboteur of timber operations in Canada. Nathu, a Kenyan archaeologist and scholar who finds himself at the centre of the hectic activity surrounding the evidence to prove the importance of the Saraswati. Harsimran, Bollywood stunt double who ends up in a Saraswati-inspired game show. And, finally, teenaged Mussafir, across the border in Pakistan, who sneaks into India just so that he can finally meet his idol.
Each of these stories, melded together by an unnamed female journalist (also a descendant of Sejal and Jugaad), are very like the phulkaris Johal describes so lovingly: vivid, colourful, so highly detailed that their characters come alive. Running through each of them, like the gold thread Sejal works into each phulkari, connecting one piece of cloth with the other, are common themes. Love and loss, for instance. Acceptance, learning to cope. Resilience. The destruction of the environment, and the politicking that goes on around it. Bigotry, an inflated sense of pride in a hoary past one does not really know. The mad race for fame, for power and wealth, for followers on social media.
At nearly 400 pages long, Saraswati isn’t a short novel. But Johal’s style of writing is so fluid and readable, his characters so nuanced and real, that it never seems a slog. The book is a story well-told, a story that shines a harsh light on our tumultuous, harrowing times—and, in its way, manages to provide inspiration on how to survive them.
(From my review for The New Indian Express, here: https://www.newindianexpress.com/maga...)
It is a motto singularly apt for the book itself, a sprawling story of a family that begins in Punjab, spreads out across the world, and then circles back to Punjab. The story begins on a river, is tied up inextricably with rivers, and ends at the river for which it is named: the Saraswati. In between the beginning and the end are tales that, river-like, rise and fall, go here and there. Are tied to the earth, and are always, eventually, about strength, of whatever kind.
Saraswati begins with British-born Satnam returning to his ancestral village in Punjab with his parents following his grandmother’s death. As part of her legacy, Satnam’s Bibi has left a farm, as well as seven hand-embroidered phulkaris, which Satnam finds intriguing. Even as his parents wind up their work in Punjab and return to the UK, Satnam stays on, unable to break loose. The well on the farm begins to fill up with water, and when scholars and scientists investigate, they come to the conclusion that this is the long-submerged Saraswati, coming to life again. The river rises, and with it rises a frenzy of Hindu nationalism, invoking the sacred river and using it to garner public approval.
From Satnam, the tale moves back more than a century, to 1878. During a famine, a young woman named Sejal accompanies her sister, a bride, across the river to the sister’s new home. The old boatman has been replaced by a young man named Jugaad, and the chemistry between Sejal and Jugaad is instant. Their love story is the foundation of the novel: Sejal and Jugaad marry, much against the wishes of her family, and they name their children after the rivers of their land.
It is the descendants of these people whose stories form the intertwining threads of the main narrative. There is Satnam, of course. And Mauritius-born Katrina, trekking to Mount Kailash in an attempt to fulfil a desire of her late husband. There is Gyan, musician and underground saboteur of timber operations in Canada. Nathu, a Kenyan archaeologist and scholar who finds himself at the centre of the hectic activity surrounding the evidence to prove the importance of the Saraswati. Harsimran, Bollywood stunt double who ends up in a Saraswati-inspired game show. And, finally, teenaged Mussafir, across the border in Pakistan, who sneaks into India just so that he can finally meet his idol.
Each of these stories, melded together by an unnamed female journalist (also a descendant of Sejal and Jugaad), are very like the phulkaris Johal describes so lovingly: vivid, colourful, so highly detailed that their characters come alive. Running through each of them, like the gold thread Sejal works into each phulkari, connecting one piece of cloth with the other, are common themes. Love and loss, for instance. Acceptance, learning to cope. Resilience. The destruction of the environment, and the politicking that goes on around it. Bigotry, an inflated sense of pride in a hoary past one does not really know. The mad race for fame, for power and wealth, for followers on social media.
At nearly 400 pages long, Saraswati isn’t a short novel. But Johal’s style of writing is so fluid and readable, his characters so nuanced and real, that it never seems a slog. The book is a story well-told, a story that shines a harsh light on our tumultuous, harrowing times—and, in its way, manages to provide inspiration on how to survive them.
(From my review for The New Indian Express, here: https://www.newindianexpress.com/maga...)
July 27, 2025
Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal is my introduction to this author. The writing is ambitious, covering a lot of ground. At the core, this is a journey of Sejal and Jugaad, their family spanning across multiple generations and countries whilst also touching on toxic nationalist politics, issues over water rights and climate change, about the greed of the capitalists and their individualistic motives claiming countless lives in the process.
What I loved about this book is certain characters and their stories which I thought were wonderfully written and have stayed with me, Satnam and Harsimran were particularly well thought out and easy to follow. Interwoven within the plot were Indian/Punjabi folk tales which brought a gorgeous cultural flavour to the overall storyline. The South-Asian representation was laudable and it was interesting how the author used the image of the family members named after rivers in India. The flow of these rivers a metaphor to depict the trajectory of a family that starts off in India and continues it's journey to settle across various locations in the world, ultimately fate (and the use of a find your family technology) bringing these characters together to where it all started, and how the political and geographical climate of the time affects them all of them in different ways,
That said, multiple characters and packing alot on the current Hindu nationalist politics, whilst reading on an e-reader, made this hard to follow at times. After the first character's short story, the narrative suddenly turned from third person to first person and it was unclear whose point of view it was. We delve deep into the lives of the protagonists, which can be read as short novellas that entwine to create a greater narrative but at really hard-hitting moments, which may have benefitted with a pause to garner a more impactful reading experience, it was lacking the punch required. I found myself re-reading sentences where a plot twist was dropped without much clamour.
Having finished the book, I can't say with any certainty what the message was, with loose storylines and unexplored themes I think the author had some brilliant ideas but was unable to execute them effectively. Perhaps this would have fared better as a series/duology, if the storyline was properly developed and fleshed out. Unfortunately I can't say with certainty if that would have worked for this genre - this is not a novel but carried far too much information to process and organise within one book. The flashbacks and inclusion of folk tales could have done with some additional editing as I think they added words to the book which made it unnecessarily crowded.
Overall, I did enjoy this book in its parts and would recommend to fans of literary fiction and wanting to read something a bit serious dealing with real issues in contemporary India and a nationalistic agenda. Thank you to netgalley, Serpent's Tail, Viper and Profile books for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest unedited review.
What I loved about this book is certain characters and their stories which I thought were wonderfully written and have stayed with me, Satnam and Harsimran were particularly well thought out and easy to follow. Interwoven within the plot were Indian/Punjabi folk tales which brought a gorgeous cultural flavour to the overall storyline. The South-Asian representation was laudable and it was interesting how the author used the image of the family members named after rivers in India. The flow of these rivers a metaphor to depict the trajectory of a family that starts off in India and continues it's journey to settle across various locations in the world, ultimately fate (and the use of a find your family technology) bringing these characters together to where it all started, and how the political and geographical climate of the time affects them all of them in different ways,
That said, multiple characters and packing alot on the current Hindu nationalist politics, whilst reading on an e-reader, made this hard to follow at times. After the first character's short story, the narrative suddenly turned from third person to first person and it was unclear whose point of view it was. We delve deep into the lives of the protagonists, which can be read as short novellas that entwine to create a greater narrative but at really hard-hitting moments, which may have benefitted with a pause to garner a more impactful reading experience, it was lacking the punch required. I found myself re-reading sentences where a plot twist was dropped without much clamour.
Having finished the book, I can't say with any certainty what the message was, with loose storylines and unexplored themes I think the author had some brilliant ideas but was unable to execute them effectively. Perhaps this would have fared better as a series/duology, if the storyline was properly developed and fleshed out. Unfortunately I can't say with certainty if that would have worked for this genre - this is not a novel but carried far too much information to process and organise within one book. The flashbacks and inclusion of folk tales could have done with some additional editing as I think they added words to the book which made it unnecessarily crowded.
Overall, I did enjoy this book in its parts and would recommend to fans of literary fiction and wanting to read something a bit serious dealing with real issues in contemporary India and a nationalistic agenda. Thank you to netgalley, Serpent's Tail, Viper and Profile books for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest unedited review.
January 1, 2026
This started off really well and i was engrossed but then I started to lose track of all the different characters and their completley different stories. It seems like a collection of short stories that have been linked by some historial family roots. Seems the author wanted to cover quite a lot of ground and commentary. Whilst it all tied together in the end, i'm not a fan of stories where there is so much going on and to remember. But it was a good reading experience.
Set in a near-future world ravaged by acute water shortages and escalating climate conflict, "Saraswati" is a multi-generational epic that follows the scattered descendants of Sejal and Jugaad. In the late 19th-century Punjab, Sejal, a gifted seamstress, and Jugaad, a Chamar boatman, defied caste boundaries to elope. United by their love of storytelling, they raised seven children, naming them after the rivers of the Punjab: the five classic rivers (Sutlej, Bease, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum), the transboundary Indus, and a seventh, Saraswati, named after the mythical river believed to have gone underground. Their lineage is physically linked through generations by fragments of red cloth and intricate phulkari dupatta (embroidered scarves) stitched with a mysterious line of gold thread, which seem to map out where each child eventually settled across the global diaspora.
The modern narrative is structured into seven chapters, each centering on a different descendant. The story is ignited when Satnam, a passive young man from Wolverhampton, visits his grandmother’s drought-stricken farm in Punjab and discovers a well suddenly brimming with water. This miracle is instantly co-opted by a militant nationalist movement led by an ambitious General, who claims the ancient Saraswati River has returned to herald a new era of Indian supremacy. Satnam is swept up as a "heavy" for the movement, intimidating farmers into selling their land for the river’s "rediscovery." As the political fervor grows, we meet other descendants: Katrina, a pest control specialist in Diego Garcia battling "Yellow Crazy Ants"; Nathu, an archaeologist in an asexual marriage searching for a "Rosetta Stone" for the Saraswati civilization; Gyan, an eco-activist sabotaging logging in Canada; Harsimran, a stunt double facing a religiously charged trial over a car accident involving a sacred bull; and Mussafir, a teenage hustler attempting to cross the closed India-Pakistan border to see a film about the goddess Saraswati, only to become an unwitting pawn in a biological terrorist attack involving a cow.
Interleaved between these modern chapters is the legendary origin story of Sejal and Jugaad, told through fables and folklore. The entire narrative is eventually revealed to be curated by an unnamed first-person narrator, a feature writer and descendant herself who used a genetic mapping app to trace her kin. Her research acts as the "gold thread" connecting the disparate lives, culminating in a dramatic climax featuring dam collapses, catastrophic crowd crushes, and the looming threat of international water wars. Ultimately, the novel reveals how the "lost" Saraswati river serves as a metaphor for the family itself once hidden and scattered, but eventually resurfacing through the power of shared memory and bloodline.
Set in a near-future world ravaged by acute water shortages and escalating climate conflict, "Saraswati" is a multi-generational epic that follows the scattered descendants of Sejal and Jugaad. In the late 19th-century Punjab, Sejal, a gifted seamstress, and Jugaad, a Chamar boatman, defied caste boundaries to elope. United by their love of storytelling, they raised seven children, naming them after the rivers of the Punjab: the five classic rivers (Sutlej, Bease, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum), the transboundary Indus, and a seventh, Saraswati, named after the mythical river believed to have gone underground. Their lineage is physically linked through generations by fragments of red cloth and intricate phulkari dupatta (embroidered scarves) stitched with a mysterious line of gold thread, which seem to map out where each child eventually settled across the global diaspora.
The modern narrative is structured into seven chapters, each centering on a different descendant. The story is ignited when Satnam, a passive young man from Wolverhampton, visits his grandmother’s drought-stricken farm in Punjab and discovers a well suddenly brimming with water. This miracle is instantly co-opted by a militant nationalist movement led by an ambitious General, who claims the ancient Saraswati River has returned to herald a new era of Indian supremacy. Satnam is swept up as a "heavy" for the movement, intimidating farmers into selling their land for the river’s "rediscovery." As the political fervor grows, we meet other descendants: Katrina, a pest control specialist in Diego Garcia battling "Yellow Crazy Ants"; Nathu, an archaeologist in an asexual marriage searching for a "Rosetta Stone" for the Saraswati civilization; Gyan, an eco-activist sabotaging logging in Canada; Harsimran, a stunt double facing a religiously charged trial over a car accident involving a sacred bull; and Mussafir, a teenage hustler attempting to cross the closed India-Pakistan border to see a film about the goddess Saraswati, only to become an unwitting pawn in a biological terrorist attack involving a cow.
Interleaved between these modern chapters is the legendary origin story of Sejal and Jugaad, told through fables and folklore. The entire narrative is eventually revealed to be curated by an unnamed first-person narrator, a feature writer and descendant herself who used a genetic mapping app to trace her kin. Her research acts as the "gold thread" connecting the disparate lives, culminating in a dramatic climax featuring dam collapses, catastrophic crowd crushes, and the looming threat of international water wars. Ultimately, the novel reveals how the "lost" Saraswati river serves as a metaphor for the family itself once hidden and scattered, but eventually resurfacing through the power of shared memory and bloodline.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 20, 2025
What drew me to Gurnaik Johal’s debut novel was its setting. Rural Punjab. A land so central to Indian history and culture but strictly understood via its stereotypical representations on film and in literature. Mustard fields, saag and makki ki roti. We love easy definitions and identifiers, because it makes the process of Othering easy too. But this novel is a marvellous achievement that undoes much of this standardisation. I could read it again and again and again.
The finest quality of the novel is its riverine form. Stories emerge like small hamlets by the shores of a meandering river. Each with a life of its own, a rebellion of its own, and yet sustained by a common blood of that which flows through or skirts their edges. Water that connects us all and gives us our own lives too, despite everything.
The other quality that worked very well was the novel’s incredible political layering, so much so that it could almost qualify as non-fiction.
A well in rural Punjab comes back to life at the beginning of the novel. It is assumed that the mythical river Saraswati has resurfaced. Soon a cult develops around the event, led by an opportunistic fascist—only too real in post-2014 India. Capitalism, religious fundamentalism and wild conspiracy theories meld into a devious monster, to suck the life out of the other rivers of Punjab, in order to revive the one the majoritarian regime wants to rebrand—that would allow these soulless thugs to win elections and power.
Myths and legends, folk tales and oral memories come alive in this transportive novel; technologies of life that are receding everyday because of the urban sprawl. At some points I doubted the ambition of the novel; it reads like a collection of short stories, almost. But the novel outsmarted me. The final pages tie everything together with such delicate precision (without becoming overdramatised or complicated) and tenderness that it hardly seems like a debut. This is overall a superb novel. One that you must read, if you think Indian writing in English is in danger. We should certainly worry about the politics more urgently.
Cannot wait to read more from Gurnaik Johal.
The finest quality of the novel is its riverine form. Stories emerge like small hamlets by the shores of a meandering river. Each with a life of its own, a rebellion of its own, and yet sustained by a common blood of that which flows through or skirts their edges. Water that connects us all and gives us our own lives too, despite everything.
The other quality that worked very well was the novel’s incredible political layering, so much so that it could almost qualify as non-fiction.
A well in rural Punjab comes back to life at the beginning of the novel. It is assumed that the mythical river Saraswati has resurfaced. Soon a cult develops around the event, led by an opportunistic fascist—only too real in post-2014 India. Capitalism, religious fundamentalism and wild conspiracy theories meld into a devious monster, to suck the life out of the other rivers of Punjab, in order to revive the one the majoritarian regime wants to rebrand—that would allow these soulless thugs to win elections and power.
Myths and legends, folk tales and oral memories come alive in this transportive novel; technologies of life that are receding everyday because of the urban sprawl. At some points I doubted the ambition of the novel; it reads like a collection of short stories, almost. But the novel outsmarted me. The final pages tie everything together with such delicate precision (without becoming overdramatised or complicated) and tenderness that it hardly seems like a debut. This is overall a superb novel. One that you must read, if you think Indian writing in English is in danger. We should certainly worry about the politics more urgently.
Cannot wait to read more from Gurnaik Johal.
February 7, 2026
🌊 ᗷOOK ᖇEᐯIEᗯ 🌊
Gurnaik Johal’s 𝙎𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙨𝙬𝙖𝙩𝙞 begins with a powerful idea: 𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙨 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙖 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜‑𝙗𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙙 𝙧𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖𝙨𝙠𝙨 𝙖 𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙩 𝙞𝙩𝙨 𝙥𝙖𝙨𝙩? From that first spark, Johal weaves a story about family, memory, and the complicated ways history flows through us, whether we want it to or not.
The heart of the novel begins with Sejal and Jugaad, whose love story sets an entire family line in motion. Their seven children, named after the rivers of Punjab, serve as the starting point for a multigenerational journey that spans India, Kenya, Canada, Pakistan, Singapore, and even Svalbard. Johal’s strength shines through in the characters who feel the most grounded. Satnam’s return to Punjab and Harsimran’s life as a stunt double are mind-boggling to me. The folk tales, the phulkari motifs, and the cultural details add heart and emotion to the book. You can feel the author's connection to the land and the people who shaped this story.
Johal also tackles big themes: environmental loss, water rights, nationalism, and the ways political myths influence daily life. His writing is thoughtful, and his ideas are significant. This novel aims to say something meaningful.
At times, the structure makes the journey a little challenging. The quick shifts in time and perspective can feel overwhelming, and the story contains so much that the emotional moments don't always land as clearly as they could. The flow of the rivers is a beautiful metaphor, but the storytelling sometimes becomes harder to follow. Still, there are moments and characters that stay with you long after you close the book.
Even with its unevenness, 𝙎𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙨𝙬𝙖𝙩𝙞 is a bold debut. Readers who enjoy literary fiction and stories rooted in culture, politics, and family legacy will find a lot to explore here.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
.
.
🗣️ 𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐨𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬, 𝐨𝐫 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝?
🌟Thank you partners @coloredpagesbt, @pegasus_books, and @tantoraudio for the immersive reading experience.🌟
🏷 #Saraswati #GurnaikJohal #SaraswatiTour #ColoredPagesBookTours #Bookish #Bookstagrammer #BookLover #wellreadblackgirl #bookreview
Gurnaik Johal’s 𝙎𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙨𝙬𝙖𝙩𝙞 begins with a powerful idea: 𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙨 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙖 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜‑𝙗𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙙 𝙧𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖𝙨𝙠𝙨 𝙖 𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙩 𝙞𝙩𝙨 𝙥𝙖𝙨𝙩? From that first spark, Johal weaves a story about family, memory, and the complicated ways history flows through us, whether we want it to or not.
The heart of the novel begins with Sejal and Jugaad, whose love story sets an entire family line in motion. Their seven children, named after the rivers of Punjab, serve as the starting point for a multigenerational journey that spans India, Kenya, Canada, Pakistan, Singapore, and even Svalbard. Johal’s strength shines through in the characters who feel the most grounded. Satnam’s return to Punjab and Harsimran’s life as a stunt double are mind-boggling to me. The folk tales, the phulkari motifs, and the cultural details add heart and emotion to the book. You can feel the author's connection to the land and the people who shaped this story.
Johal also tackles big themes: environmental loss, water rights, nationalism, and the ways political myths influence daily life. His writing is thoughtful, and his ideas are significant. This novel aims to say something meaningful.
At times, the structure makes the journey a little challenging. The quick shifts in time and perspective can feel overwhelming, and the story contains so much that the emotional moments don't always land as clearly as they could. The flow of the rivers is a beautiful metaphor, but the storytelling sometimes becomes harder to follow. Still, there are moments and characters that stay with you long after you close the book.
Even with its unevenness, 𝙎𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙨𝙬𝙖𝙩𝙞 is a bold debut. Readers who enjoy literary fiction and stories rooted in culture, politics, and family legacy will find a lot to explore here.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
.
.
🗣️ 𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐨𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬, 𝐨𝐫 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝?
🌟Thank you partners @coloredpagesbt, @pegasus_books, and @tantoraudio for the immersive reading experience.🌟
🏷 #Saraswati #GurnaikJohal #SaraswatiTour #ColoredPagesBookTours #Bookish #Bookstagrammer #BookLover #wellreadblackgirl #bookreview
October 14, 2025
The October 2025 read was Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal. It is always impressive when young people are able to produce something that obviously took time and thought. However, in this instance, it has missed the mark by many leagues.
The author has picked up interesting themes - family, climate change, human intervention, political and religious upheaval, caste system and so on. Too many to be explored in depth.
There is no problem in an author expressing his/her political ideologies - but no-one likes to be tricked into it. The title of the book and blurb promised an interesting take on a river that has huge spiritual significance to a particular demographic in India. It has failed spectacularly to put across this significance and has managed to trivialize the whole experience throughout the book. As someone pointed out, all moral stands in the book came from the west, the locals were just murdering fanatics.
There is absolute bending of folklore and long-held beliefs that will be picked up as truth by a reader who knows nothing about this country. Saraswati became a caricature to be mocked in this book. Poor Lord Brahma becomes a lecherous old man. The Harappan seal becomes something out of Kamasutra.
While it pains me to see the author trying so hard to find his roots, there is an incredible disconnect with the country that he is writing about. Once again, we were forced to admit that an Indian name no longer promises an Indian experience for the reader in this age of global migration and search for identity. The strongest part of the book are the family qissas and the Phulkari, which takes on a character of its own with incredible depth and dimension. Same could not be said of any of the other characters except to some extent Jugaad and Sejal.
Rating: ⭐
Recommendation: Will not recommend at all
The author has picked up interesting themes - family, climate change, human intervention, political and religious upheaval, caste system and so on. Too many to be explored in depth.
There is no problem in an author expressing his/her political ideologies - but no-one likes to be tricked into it. The title of the book and blurb promised an interesting take on a river that has huge spiritual significance to a particular demographic in India. It has failed spectacularly to put across this significance and has managed to trivialize the whole experience throughout the book. As someone pointed out, all moral stands in the book came from the west, the locals were just murdering fanatics.
There is absolute bending of folklore and long-held beliefs that will be picked up as truth by a reader who knows nothing about this country. Saraswati became a caricature to be mocked in this book. Poor Lord Brahma becomes a lecherous old man. The Harappan seal becomes something out of Kamasutra.
While it pains me to see the author trying so hard to find his roots, there is an incredible disconnect with the country that he is writing about. Once again, we were forced to admit that an Indian name no longer promises an Indian experience for the reader in this age of global migration and search for identity. The strongest part of the book are the family qissas and the Phulkari, which takes on a character of its own with incredible depth and dimension. Same could not be said of any of the other characters except to some extent Jugaad and Sejal.
Rating: ⭐
Recommendation: Will not recommend at all
November 17, 2025
“If she hadn't run out of thread, if her sister wasn't getting married, if River Baba hadn't died, Sejal might not have met Jugaad. And if the clouds hadn't arrived, and the rain hadn't fallen, if the fate of the village hadn't changed, maybe nothing would have passed between them. All the generations after them, all those branches, it was all down to two people meeting, beginning to talk. It was the same old story for everyone, a dream of a story that doesn't end, that always changes, a pattern large enough to hold everything within it.” Massively enjoyed Gurnaik Johal’s emotive epic Saraswati, a novel which moves across continents and centuries and perspectives to tell a deeply felt story of family, displacement and meaning-making. Admittedly I hit a wall when I read the first chapter of it months ago — I felt not up to the task of the first big character shift. When I finally came back to it and pushed through I was rewarded so quickly, with each character becoming more fascinating, the connections between them slowly emerging but so satisfying, and the overarching plot taking its dark shape. Highly original and beautifully told, its one of the year’s finest novels I’ve read, and its reflections on narrative itself really spoke to me and, I think, speak deeply to us all these days. “There was a rhythm to it, like there was a rhythm to everything. Wait long enough and everything repeats. The arc of the universe, he thought, was an orbit. The repetition was coming, even if you wouldn't live long enough to see it.” “It was, perhaps, one of the few positive memories he had of his father, the way he'd embellish their family origin story. […] It had been an early education, Nathu thought, in the fact that all history was historical fiction. A story had a longer life than a fact.” Many many thanks to Serpent’s Tail for sending me this stunner!
July 22, 2025
This piece of art is a miraculous beast: part political satire, part elegy for the diaspora, and part fever dream. Saraswati rushes forward like the mythical river at its heart, cutting through myth, memory, and modern life with a stunning, almost mythical energy. Gurnaik Johal, in his debut no less (!), juggles chaos and control so expertly that you might forget you’re reading fiction,it feels more like a spell being cast.
We meet Satnam, a disoriented brown Londoner who stumbles into rural Punjab for his grandmother’s funeral. But what does he discover? Water in a well that was supposed to be dry. From that single drop, Johal unfurls a narrative that weaves across continents, timelines, and emotional landscapes. It’s like Rushdie without the ornate prose; it’s Arundhati Roy with a quicker pulse.
Johal’s characters are a diverse bunch: a Kenyan archaeologist piecing together history, a Bollywood stunt double navigating both the film world and his past, and an ambitious writer who treats legacy like it’s a birthright. Each voice is unique, yet they all dance together in a chaotic ballet of identity, grief, love, and reclamation. There’s a sense of nationalism. There are ancestral ghosts. And yes, there’s even YouTube.
Johal’s language is rich, incisive, and witty. He writes as if he’s eavesdropping on deities and chatting with spirits. Some chapters hit you like a slap; others resonate like a hymn. He embraces the messiness of life. He thrives in it.
And isn’t that the essence? The river is both tangible and symbolic. It flows through land, memory, and myth—never fully visible, always felt.
Gurnaik Johal isn’t just a writer to keep an eye on, he’s already made his mark.
We meet Satnam, a disoriented brown Londoner who stumbles into rural Punjab for his grandmother’s funeral. But what does he discover? Water in a well that was supposed to be dry. From that single drop, Johal unfurls a narrative that weaves across continents, timelines, and emotional landscapes. It’s like Rushdie without the ornate prose; it’s Arundhati Roy with a quicker pulse.
Johal’s characters are a diverse bunch: a Kenyan archaeologist piecing together history, a Bollywood stunt double navigating both the film world and his past, and an ambitious writer who treats legacy like it’s a birthright. Each voice is unique, yet they all dance together in a chaotic ballet of identity, grief, love, and reclamation. There’s a sense of nationalism. There are ancestral ghosts. And yes, there’s even YouTube.
Johal’s language is rich, incisive, and witty. He writes as if he’s eavesdropping on deities and chatting with spirits. Some chapters hit you like a slap; others resonate like a hymn. He embraces the messiness of life. He thrives in it.
And isn’t that the essence? The river is both tangible and symbolic. It flows through land, memory, and myth—never fully visible, always felt.
Gurnaik Johal isn’t just a writer to keep an eye on, he’s already made his mark.
August 30, 2025
I’m conflicted on what to give this ??? On one hand I really loved the interwoven stories, focusing on family relationships, climate, politics, nature, and the connectedness of people from all reaches of the world. The storytelling and the focus on language was also written so beautifully, and of course the history and the focus on one river was such an interesting focal point to the novel. It impacts these characters in its own way, and it was quite thought provoking to see it become a political talking point, causing strife and disagreements.
However, it was also quite convoluted and at times felt like Johal was trying to show his historical and cultural knowledge off in this form of this book. It went off on some weird tangents within history that really made me loose my way, and took me out of the story itself, and I was left baffled to the inclusion of it as it didn’t seem to benefit the story. Some of the historical and cultural references were very much needed and enjoyed, especially the stories that are passed down, but this wasn’t the case for all of it and definitely needed some further editing. I was also left confused by the timeline - when is this set? What’s the time period? In the first chapter, I assumed it was in the past but as it progresses you realise it’s not. The amount of characters spun me as well; there’s a very small family tree at the start that definitely should’ve been elaborated upon, with more information, so I could refer back to it.
It’s difficult; I would recommend this as ultimately I enjoyed reading it, but I think Johal was trying to be too clever in format rather than focusing on cohesion within the story, that makes it almost quite hard to digest and follow at times.
However, it was also quite convoluted and at times felt like Johal was trying to show his historical and cultural knowledge off in this form of this book. It went off on some weird tangents within history that really made me loose my way, and took me out of the story itself, and I was left baffled to the inclusion of it as it didn’t seem to benefit the story. Some of the historical and cultural references were very much needed and enjoyed, especially the stories that are passed down, but this wasn’t the case for all of it and definitely needed some further editing. I was also left confused by the timeline - when is this set? What’s the time period? In the first chapter, I assumed it was in the past but as it progresses you realise it’s not. The amount of characters spun me as well; there’s a very small family tree at the start that definitely should’ve been elaborated upon, with more information, so I could refer back to it.
It’s difficult; I would recommend this as ultimately I enjoyed reading it, but I think Johal was trying to be too clever in format rather than focusing on cohesion within the story, that makes it almost quite hard to digest and follow at times.
February 12, 2026
A book set in the near future where climate change is beginning to impact the world and water and the ownership of it brings power. It is the tale of a family that sort of starts in the late 1800s with a couple who defy their parents and start a life together. They go on to have 7 children who gradually disperse around the world. The novel is split into 7 sections and each one deals with one of the descendants of the original 7.
You get a diverse set of characters this way with everything from a man who inherits the original farm and then decides to stay rather than sell, a musician turned eco warrior, an archeologist, a scientist specialising in a particular type of invasive ant, a stuntman double and a young content creator. The final section is told by a journalist who is responsible for bringing most of the others together via DNA testing.
Along the way you've got the politics of India recreating the lost river and most of our characters get involved in some way with that. There is also an underlying theme about fences which crop up several times and never in a good way. The ending hints at the negative impact of selfishness.
Whilst I enjoyed the book and it had interesting themes I don't think it hung together as a coherent whole. The story of the original couple and her needlework acts as a literal thread throughout along with the power of stories passed down through the oral tradition but not enough to carry the often lengthy back stories.
For me, although the writing is good and the descriptions at times wonderful, this book needed more of a central narrator. Powerful message though and the author had clearly done his research (and referenced it too).
You get a diverse set of characters this way with everything from a man who inherits the original farm and then decides to stay rather than sell, a musician turned eco warrior, an archeologist, a scientist specialising in a particular type of invasive ant, a stuntman double and a young content creator. The final section is told by a journalist who is responsible for bringing most of the others together via DNA testing.
Along the way you've got the politics of India recreating the lost river and most of our characters get involved in some way with that. There is also an underlying theme about fences which crop up several times and never in a good way. The ending hints at the negative impact of selfishness.
Whilst I enjoyed the book and it had interesting themes I don't think it hung together as a coherent whole. The story of the original couple and her needlework acts as a literal thread throughout along with the power of stories passed down through the oral tradition but not enough to carry the often lengthy back stories.
For me, although the writing is good and the descriptions at times wonderful, this book needed more of a central narrator. Powerful message though and the author had clearly done his research (and referenced it too).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 19, 2025
In the morning, Sejal gave Beas a set of phulkari dupattas she'd made for her. Then, she took the red blanket and cut it with a knife, making an equal section of the cloth for each of the six children...
When Ravi and Beas were ready to leave, Sejal handed then each a section of the cloth and said, 'Wherever you end up, you bring this back to me and I'll stitch it together. And if you can't, you pass them down, and you tell your children to return.'
———
Saraswati surprised me. Though framed as a novel about the re-emergence of a long-lost river in rural India, this event primarily becomes a backdrop through which a tale of the interconnected lives of several distant relatives flows. Told from eight different perspectives across two time-periods, it is no wonder that the most frequently used adjective to describe this debut is 'ambitious'.
Given the deeply complex nature of this family tree, the novel is just begging for a visual representation (or several: unfolding branches as we discover the relationships between characters) which would avoid breaking immersion in trying to figure out who's who. Meandering through so many different lives, great care is taken to create rich and dynamic portraits of each character, though the second chapter's protagonist is so frustratingly disconnected from the titular plot that it's like a cold shock to the system. I found this a disservice to the narrative until the river manages to break over again into the spotlight.
Nonetheless, this is a stunning debut that demands to be savoured slowly and intimately. Johal's prose is beautiful, intricate, and intense, however it can at times sacrifice coherence for the sake of being egregiously literary. The political and cultural commentaries felt well-researched and engaging, and I wish we could have seen even more of this side of the story through each character's perspective.
Though those cautious of literary fiction may be tempted to give this a wide berth, I would wholeheartedly suggest giving it a few chapters' worth of opportunity to pull you into its depths.
Thank you to Profile Books for providing me a proof copy of this debut. And yes, I did take the opportunity to flood this review with river terminology... (thank you for enduring)
*Read for the Waterstones' 2025 Debut Fiction Prize Shortlist*
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗 4.5 / 5
When Ravi and Beas were ready to leave, Sejal handed then each a section of the cloth and said, 'Wherever you end up, you bring this back to me and I'll stitch it together. And if you can't, you pass them down, and you tell your children to return.'
———
Saraswati surprised me. Though framed as a novel about the re-emergence of a long-lost river in rural India, this event primarily becomes a backdrop through which a tale of the interconnected lives of several distant relatives flows. Told from eight different perspectives across two time-periods, it is no wonder that the most frequently used adjective to describe this debut is 'ambitious'.
Given the deeply complex nature of this family tree, the novel is just begging for a visual representation (or several: unfolding branches as we discover the relationships between characters) which would avoid breaking immersion in trying to figure out who's who. Meandering through so many different lives, great care is taken to create rich and dynamic portraits of each character, though the second chapter's protagonist is so frustratingly disconnected from the titular plot that it's like a cold shock to the system. I found this a disservice to the narrative until the river manages to break over again into the spotlight.
Nonetheless, this is a stunning debut that demands to be savoured slowly and intimately. Johal's prose is beautiful, intricate, and intense, however it can at times sacrifice coherence for the sake of being egregiously literary. The political and cultural commentaries felt well-researched and engaging, and I wish we could have seen even more of this side of the story through each character's perspective.
Though those cautious of literary fiction may be tempted to give this a wide berth, I would wholeheartedly suggest giving it a few chapters' worth of opportunity to pull you into its depths.
Thank you to Profile Books for providing me a proof copy of this debut. And yes, I did take the opportunity to flood this review with river terminology... (thank you for enduring)
*Read for the Waterstones' 2025 Debut Fiction Prize Shortlist*
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗 4.5 / 5
June 29, 2025
Tracing a group of people unexpectedly connected by heritage and a project to revive the Saraswati River, Johal's novel is composed of vivid episodes that explore environmentalism, our relationship with history and heritage, and the rising tide of Indian nationalism. It its ambitious scope, SARASWATI evokes predecessors like the novels of Arundhati Roy, and particularly the work of Richard Powers, which likewise use a controlling metaphor of an environmental phenomenon (the ecosystems of trees or oceans, or in this case that of a river) to link disparate characters and comment on the interconnectedness of natural and human life.
Johal's work showcases both the greatest strengths and limits of this writing style. The individual episodes and characters of SARASWATI are compellingly drawn and tackle pertinent cultural questions gracefully—I particularly enjoyed a section later in the book dealing with the misadventures of an actor involved in a faux-historical reality show, which dealt cleverly with the links between filmmaking, cultural nationalism, and reality's relationship to fiction. However, the sprawling scope of the novel and the sometimes confusing switches between point-of-view characters meant that this novel felt more like a collection of stories rather than a cohesive whole. Whether it's giving the plot more of a cohesive through-line or more clearly demarcating it into chapters or episodes, I wonder if I'd have enjoyed SARASWATI more if it had a tighter structure.
Johal's work showcases both the greatest strengths and limits of this writing style. The individual episodes and characters of SARASWATI are compellingly drawn and tackle pertinent cultural questions gracefully—I particularly enjoyed a section later in the book dealing with the misadventures of an actor involved in a faux-historical reality show, which dealt cleverly with the links between filmmaking, cultural nationalism, and reality's relationship to fiction. However, the sprawling scope of the novel and the sometimes confusing switches between point-of-view characters meant that this novel felt more like a collection of stories rather than a cohesive whole. Whether it's giving the plot more of a cohesive through-line or more clearly demarcating it into chapters or episodes, I wonder if I'd have enjoyed SARASWATI more if it had a tighter structure.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews