Whoever was asked to write the blurb for Preti Taneja’s novel We That Are Young must have faced something of a quandary: when, or how (perhaps, even, whether) to reveal that it is a retelling of King Lear.
You can understand the problem. How best to acknowledge the ingenuity of this novel without making it sound like a niche literary interest? Or, to put it another way, if you alert the reader that the saga of modern India in their hands is actually a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shakespeare, will they be tempted to put it straight back on the shelf? You might forgive them, at least, for wondering whether this was merely a staging, or something new.
It is, in fact, both. Taneja, a