The Immortal King Rao: A Novel

Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Nominated for the 2022 NBCC John Leonard Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Esquire, Vox, Philadelphia Inquirer, & Literary Hub

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.

In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.

With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet & 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.

The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary & speculative fiction, the historic & the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism & where our actions might take us next. 

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Vauhini Vara has been a reporter & editor for the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, & the New York Times Magazine, & is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao & the short story collection This Is Salvaged. 

https://www.vauhinivara.com/