A Time Outside This Time by Amitava Kumar

A Time Outside This Time tells a story we are all too familiar with, as Amitava Kumar tries to grasp how we find the truth when we are surrounded by a plague of fake news, biased reporting and questionable world leaders. Blurring lines between fiction and reality, the novel paints a picture of America and the narrator Satya’s homeland, India, including tweets by Donald Trump. Satya is at a writers’ retreat in Italy at the start of the pandemic, and while his fellow writers find the outside pressures unbearable, he is inspired by the relentless misinformation and works on his book Enemies of the People. Despite Kumar’s crisp writing, the novel can be sometimes slow.