The Immortal King Rao

ANJALI ENJET, THE STAR TRIBUNE

"... thrilling ... Vara has penned a dynamic and haunting world ... Vara deftly paints Rao, who lives for more than a century, as an eccentric genius whose childhood memories shape his entrepreneurial spirit ... At its heart, The Immortal King Rao is a jarring and meticulous critique of how progress is often confused with goodness."

MALLIKA RAO, VULTURE

"Vara...sings a song all her own in a premonitory, daring book that lands somewhere between speculative fiction and bildungsroman, storytelling and fortune-telling ... The novel flashes through time and space with an agile clarity from before King's birth to grown-up Athena's present day. Yet Vara has not exactly made this book an easy read ... Perhaps it makes sense that some of the most trenchant work on the shortcomings of technotopia is written by women. Outnumbered in the industry, women drawn to the tech ecosystem can find an outsider's position from which to make sense of its overlords ... The Immortal King Rao too thrums with a pulse."