by Akash Kapur
A book that treats the search for paradise not as a naïve dream, but as a living, breathing experiment with real and sometimes devastating consequences. Akash Kapur writes with the precision of a journalist and the intimacy of a family member, pulling you into the heart of a community that tried to build a new world and the two people whose lives were defined by that attempt.
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It is the true story of John Walker and Diane Maes, two early members of the utopian community of Auroville in South India, who died under mysterious circumstances on the same day. The author, Akash Kapur, is their son-in-law and sets out to uncover what really happened to them while also telling the broader history of the community they helped build.
Akash Kapur is a writer and journalist who grew up in Auroville. He holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and is the author of India Becoming. Better to Have Gone was named a Book of the Year by several publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
They were two of the early "dreamers" who moved to Auroville in the late 1960s to help found the experimental township. John was from a prominent American family, and Diane was from Belgium. Their deaths in the 1980s became a source of lasting grief and unanswered questions for their daughter, Auralice, and the community.
Auroville is an international utopian community in Tamil Nadu, South India, founded in 1968 with the aim of creating a place where people from all countries could live together in peace and human unity, based on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.
Rather than offering a dry history or a philosophical argument, Kapur tells the story through the lives of specific people. It is a personal investigation that uses the tragedy of one family to explore the larger, often painful, realities of trying to build a perfect society. It is a narrative that blends memoir, history, and a real-life mystery.
