"A fully imagined world: propulsive, prophetic, dizzying." - Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women

"An astonishing debut. An amazing imagination. Vara's voice is thrilling, original, dynamic and ever-surprising as her characters move from world to world, from the real to the fantastic, examining the myriad contradictory shapes in which love can appear." - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Last Queen

"Vara comes out the gate with a masterwork: a book that is three great novels in one - the tale of a thriving and chaotic Dalit clan in the first decades of independent India; an immigrant success story in '80s America; and a dystopian nightmare of the post-Trump future." - Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs

"The Immortal King Rao explores the limits of our own species. Somewhere between the communal experience of Dalits in rural India and the insidious rise of MNCs and AI, lies our own fate. Vara leaves you with questions and insights-and with the feeling of being trapped, along with her characters, in a world oblivious of its own mortality." - Shubhangi Swarup, author of Latitudes of Longing

"Utterly, thrillingly brilliant. From the first unforgettable page to the last, The Immortal King Rao is a form-inventing, genre-exploding triumph. Vauhini Vara's bravura debut has reshaped my brain and expanded my heart." - R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

"The Immortal King Rao is an odyssey of the grandest scale, spanning over a century and charting a Dalit immigrant's rise to world power. Vauhini Vara fuses intricate family lore with the history of tech solutionism and capitalist demagoguery, pointing forward to a dangerously likely future of corporate dominion; she writes with the meticulous clarity of a longform journalist, the explosive force of a Trident missile, and the ambition of her own brilliant protagonists." - Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

"In this richly imagined saga spanning past, present, and future, Vauhini Vara brings us a visionary who makes the world in his image, and the strong-willed daughter whose life could be his final legacy. Vara's brilliance is matched only by her heart, and this unforgettable debut will challenge what you think you know about genius, capitalism, consciousness, and what it means to be human." - Anna North, author of Outlawed

"A brilliant and beautifully written book about capitalism and the patriarchy, about Dalit India and digital America, about power and family and love." - Alex Preston, The Observer

"An exacting writer of the digital age, journalist Vara makes her debut with a trippy novel that marries the family saga with a biotech satire. ... Vara has a gift for humanizing the invisible labor that happens behind our screens. Who, if anyone, can really separate themselves from the digital ties that bind us?" -Jessica Jacolbe, New York Magazine (Vulture)

"A sweeping, biting, elegant book for our time ... that explores tech, race, class, politics, and power." -Lydia Kiesling, The Millions

"Alternating between Rao's childhood in a small Indian village, his early student days in the US, and the dystopian society in which Athena has to function, Vara's original debut delivers challenging and weighty themes with a sure hand." - Poornima Apte, Booklist

Vauhini Vara has worked as a journalist and an editor for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine. Her fiction has been honored by the O. Henry Prize and the Rona JaffeFoundation. Her first novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for fiction as well as the JK Paper–Times of India AutHER Award for best debut.