The Holder of the World (1993) is a novel by Bharati Mukherjee. It is a retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, placing the story in two centuries (17th and 20th). The novel involves time travel via virtual reality, locating itself in 20th-century Boston, 17th-century Colonial America, and 17th-century Mughal-ruled India during the spread of the British East India Company. It also references Thomas Pynchon's novel, V.. The Holder of the World was among the contenders in a 2014 list by The Telegraph of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels
References
Further reading Luo, S. P. (2003). "Rewriting Travel: Ahdaf Soueif ’s The Map of Love and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38 (2), 77–104. Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004: 187–192.
External links Holders of the Word:An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee Breaking the Borders of Gendered Space: Female Characters in Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address and Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World Reader's guide Powells book review A Selected Annotated Bibliography
Publication history Hardcover — (), published in September 1993 by Alfred A. Knopf. Paperback — (), published in September 1994 by Random House