Ananda Devi: “This novel came to me with the force of an avalanche”

Ananda Devi’s new novel reaches for the scale of myth. Chronique d’un royaume perdu revisits Mauritius through what the book presents as a “delirious alternative history,” combining natural splendour, colonial violence and figures endowed with almost divine power.

The novel grew from material Devi carried in her notebooks for 40 years. It also draws on meetings in 1980 with two families living self-sufficiently in Bouchon, an idyllic place in southeastern Mauritius. Their presence helped feed a work that turns the island into a poetic laboratory for human predation.

The book brings together a family saga rooted in slavery with adventure, magic and characters larger than life. Its Mauritius is both a place of extraordinary beauty and a territory marked by slavery and social misery. The description presents the novel as a sensual and unsettling love song to the island, where splendour and destruction exist side by side.

Devi, born in Trois Boutiques in Mauritius’s Indian community, has lived for several decades in Ferney-Voltaire near Geneva. Mauritius gave her what she calls the “green impulse of writing,” while India serves as a continental hinterland for her fiction. She received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2024.

Her earlier work has repeatedly focused on sexual exploitation, domestic violence, resistance and revolt. In The Day of the Chameleons, published in 2023, Mauritius itself speaks through an ecological fable and warns of humanity’s impending self-destruction. Chronique d’un royaume perdu extends that freedom of invention during the 2026 literary season, arguing through its very form that fiction still has room for myth and wonder in the digital age.