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JEET THAYIL was born in 1959 into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, and educated at Jesuit schools in Bombay, Hong Kong and New York. Kerala's Syrian Christians trace their church to St. Thomas, who arrived on the Malabar coast around 50 AD and converted thirteen Hindu families to Christianity, or so tradition has it. Jeet's grandmother, Chachiamma Jacob, was the last of the family who recited from memory the hour-long service in Aramaic, Malayalam and Sanskrit that still defines the faith.
Names of the Women is an extraordinary work of restoration, playful invention, and stark beauty. In Jeet Thayil's skilled telling the gospel stories, which have lasted so long, spread so far, and become so dulled by familiarity, have their deep original strangeness returned to them. -- Chris Power Bold and compelling. -- Rebecca Abrams * Financial Times * Theologically well-informed, imaginative and affecting . . . This is a fascinating and beautiful book. You most certainly do not have to be either a Christian or a feminist to appreciate it, and, in fact, if you are neither it might make you think twice about both. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday * Achingly beautiful. Powerful, poetic and profoundly feminist. -- Jennifer Croft Jeet Thayil's Names of the Women enacts a long-overdue reinstating of female voices in the story of Jesus . . . Thayil's parade of female voices enriches a narrative hitherto synonymous with his-story with a hyphen. -- Emily Watkins * i *
