Book review
An extraordinary odyssey across space and time into the heart of desire and madness

While working in Paris on Vedic myths of the legendary river Sarasvati which disappeared in the Indian desert, a young Indologist comes across the letters of her cousin Eliya, a dancer who died in Rajasthan. Intrigued by the hallucinatory nature of the memoirs and their surreal, dreamlike ramblings, she reconstructs the last days of Eliya's life—her loneliness within the walls of a sleepy palace surrounded by the desert, her thwarted passion in a dead-end relationship with a prince and her gradual descent into insanity. Offering a fascinating counterpoint to Eliya's narrative is the story of her father who spent his childhood in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin, Prague. As the narrator seeks answers to her own existential questions, she unravels her cousin's deep secrets while providing an exposé of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War.

Moving across the grim world of a concentration camp in Prague, the vibrant landscape of Rajasthan, and the rain-splashed streets of Paris, Dominique Varma's evocative prose is an ode to the indestructible spirit of the human race.


• Edition: Paperback
• Format: B
• Extent: 192pp
• Classification: Fiction


About the author Dominique Varma has spent much of her adult life in France and India. After a serious study of classical European languages she worked as producer and director in cinema and television before going back to do a master's in Sanskrit. She started writing Shifting Sands during a four-year teaching stint at Delhi University for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She met her husband, an Indian cinematographer, in Pune, with whom she has two children. She now lives in the north of France where she teaches at the University of Lille while continuing to write her second novel as well as a non-fiction essay on her travels and the philosophy of Tantrism.