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Better To Have Gone

Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

By: Akash Kapur

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Paperback | 7 July 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
368 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20 x 13.5 x 2.5

Paperback

RRP $24.99

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A spellbinding story about love, faith, the search for utopia - and the often devastating cost of idealism.

It’s the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world - Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright.

So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon? This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone, and it carries deep personal resonance: Diane and John were the parents of Akash’s wife, Auralice. Akash and Auralice grew up in Auroville; like the rest of their community, they never really understood those deaths.

In 2004, Akash and Auralice return to Auroville from New York, where they have been living with John’s family. As they re-establish themselves, along with their two sons, in the community, they must confront the ghosts of those distant deaths. Slowly, they come to understand how the tragic individual fates of John and Diane intersected with the collective history of their town.

Better to Have Gone is a book about the human cost of our age-old quest for a more perfect world. It probes the under-explored yet universal idea of utopia, and it portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one utopian community. Richly atmospheric and filled with remarkable characters, spread across time and continents, this is narrative writing of the highest order - a heartbreaking, unforgettable story.

About the Author

Akash Kapur is the author of India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India and the editor of an anthology, Auroville: Dream and Reality. He is the former Letter from India columnist for the international New York Times, the recipient of a Whiting Grant, and has written for various leading publications. He grew up in Auroville and returned there to live with his family after boarding school and college in America.

Industry Reviews

'A forensic reconstruction of two deaths set against the background of a tropical utopia. It is beautifully written and structured, deeply moving, and realised in wise, thoughtful, chiselled prose. It tells an extraordinary tale of a paradise lost, and of the dangers of utopian naivety: what happens when dreams collide with harsh reality. Like In Cold Blood, it is that rarity: a genuine non-fiction classic.'

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