You are invited to a special Amnesty Canada Book Club event with Vauhini Vara: The author of The Immortal King Rao, a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, on Friday, November 1, from 5 to 6:30 PM Saskatchewan time.

Vauhini Vara is a writer — a journalist, editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and playwright. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the Colorado Book Award. Publications that named it as a notable book of the year in which it was published include NPR and The New York Times, where Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.”

Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as a child of Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. She lives in Colorado with her husband, the writer Andrew Altschul, and their son.

In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government.

With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion―and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world’s Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King’s childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the U.S. to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life―Athena herself.

Be sure to register in advance for this event here