Genre Fiction
![Shruti Swamy - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_shruti_swamy.jpg)
The Archer
"Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy's first book, the story collection A House Is a Body."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"[A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love."
-NPR
In this transfixing novel, a young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya's childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day she peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak, a dazzling, centuries-old dance form that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Her pursuit of artistic transcendence through kathak soon becomes the organizing principle of her life, even as she leaves home for college and falls in complicated love with her best friend. As the uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother.
Lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as mesmerizing as kathak itself, Shruti Swamy's The Archer is a bold portrait of a singular woman coming of age as an artist-navigating desire, duty, and the limits of the body. It is also an electrifying and utterly immersive story about the transformative power of art, and the possibilities that love can open when we're ready.
-San Francisco Chronicle
"[A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love."
-NPR
In this transfixing novel, a young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya's childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day she peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak, a dazzling, centuries-old dance form that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Her pursuit of artistic transcendence through kathak soon becomes the organizing principle of her life, even as she leaves home for college and falls in complicated love with her best friend. As the uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother.
Lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as mesmerizing as kathak itself, Shruti Swamy's The Archer is a bold portrait of a singular woman coming of age as an artist-navigating desire, duty, and the limits of the body. It is also an electrifying and utterly immersive story about the transformative power of art, and the possibilities that love can open when we're ready.
Editorial Reviews
Longlisted for the 2021 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
"Mesmerizingly poetic . . . The Archer's beauty resides in Swamy's sequential narrative form, which reads like music-at times almost exactly like reading a musical score-but with something more; her words carry the visceral power of a dancer's intersection with air . . . [A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love . . . A sensual, artful dance, powerfully told."
-NPR
"This novel swallowed me whole. The Archer is the kind of book you always hope for: lush and sensual, tasted and felt, with striking images that play out like film behind the eyes. Swamy evokes an India that resists flat stereotype and teems with exuberance, beauty, and life. The Archer is timeless yet utterly modern as it asks what it means for a woman to make a life of art."
-C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold
"Shruti Swamy is a writer to celebrate. Her fiction is provocative, precise, and gorgeously inventive."
-Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
"With its coiled energy and feverish imagery, The Archer often reads more like a lucid dream than a novel, oceans of wild feeling roiling just below the surface . . . Swamy writes about the imperatives of an artist's life with bright, furious poetry: the singular will of a body that burns to be in motion, and a mind set free."
-Entertainment Weekly
"[A] visceral first novel . . . The Archer blends the corporeal and the spiritual in a story about what it means to be a woman and an artist. Swamy's writing is transportive, precise and almost hypnotic . . . The author's perceptive and observant eye misses nothing."
-BookPage
"Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy's first book, the story collection A House Is a Body."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"A searing portrait of the woman artist . . . Shruti Swamy has defined hersel...
"Mesmerizingly poetic . . . The Archer's beauty resides in Swamy's sequential narrative form, which reads like music-at times almost exactly like reading a musical score-but with something more; her words carry the visceral power of a dancer's intersection with air . . . [A] sublime, boundary-pushing exploration of sexuality, creativity, and love . . . A sensual, artful dance, powerfully told."
-NPR
"This novel swallowed me whole. The Archer is the kind of book you always hope for: lush and sensual, tasted and felt, with striking images that play out like film behind the eyes. Swamy evokes an India that resists flat stereotype and teems with exuberance, beauty, and life. The Archer is timeless yet utterly modern as it asks what it means for a woman to make a life of art."
-C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold
"Shruti Swamy is a writer to celebrate. Her fiction is provocative, precise, and gorgeously inventive."
-Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
"With its coiled energy and feverish imagery, The Archer often reads more like a lucid dream than a novel, oceans of wild feeling roiling just below the surface . . . Swamy writes about the imperatives of an artist's life with bright, furious poetry: the singular will of a body that burns to be in motion, and a mind set free."
-Entertainment Weekly
"[A] visceral first novel . . . The Archer blends the corporeal and the spiritual in a story about what it means to be a woman and an artist. Swamy's writing is transportive, precise and almost hypnotic . . . The author's perceptive and observant eye misses nothing."
-BookPage
"Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy's first book, the story collection A House Is a Body."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"A searing portrait of the woman artist . . . Shruti Swamy has defined hersel...
Readers Top Reviews
ReneeSuzSusie Wil
I was drawn to The Archer by the cover and the story being set in Bombay. I started reading it three times but I'm sad to say I couldn't finish the book. I think it's the writing style that just didn't work for me; it just didn't flow smoothly. I was somewhat enjoying the story but it also moved rather slowly and I had to focus too much.
Sharon MReneeSuzS
Many thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for gifting me a digital ARC of this debut novel by Shruti Swamy and allowing me to participate in the blog tour. 4 stars! Vidya grew up with the expectations of her father and tradition in the 1960s in Bombay. She was expected to take care of her father and younger brother after her mother left. She was expected to act like a girl and not play with the boys she so desperately wanted to. She was expected to go to college and become an engineer, only to return home and take care of her father. But when she sees a dance performance called Kathak, she is desperate to learn and perfect the art. But can she dance and go to school, marry and have a child? At what cost? This was a beautifully written coming-of-age story that goes beyond the normal. The author takes the reader on a journey of Vidya's experiences, where she is always facing others expectations based on her gender, race, class. Always in the background of her choices is her elusive mother. This was a slower read and it moves abruptly into different times of Vidya's life, which makes reading it a bit more of a challenge. But it is haunting, beautiful and will definitely cause you to pause and think.
Jennifer NashShar
The Archer focuses on Vidya, a young Indian woman raised in poverty, whose mother is largely absent to her, as she struggles to find her own path despite the largely patriarchal society she lives in. At the core of Vidya's path is her love for and mastery of Kathak dance, which both provides her an everlasting means of artistic expression and the solid ground from which Vidya can make her own decisions despite societal expectations. The lyrical prose is perhaps the strongest feature in The Archer. It has a lullaby-quality that works with the first person narration to create a strong sense of nostalgia and the writing is truly beautiful but never feels forced. I also love how the novel weaves in and out of Vidya's past and present, showing how everything that happens now is impacted by everything that came before, and also how Vidya's mastery of her own destiny ebbed and flowed as her circumstances changed. Overall, a beautifully told story that I really enjoyed spending time with. The audiobook is really well narrated, as well, if you have access to that.
