Roll Back the Mountains

A family story breaks apart the postcard perfection of the Swiss landscape.Two siblings grow up in Switzerland beneath the monumental presence of the Alps, in a home shaped by their parents’ migration from South India and by the pressures of assimilation. Their family history is told in flashes: meals, quarrels, schoolrooms, religious rituals, bodily memories, jokes, and silences. The mountains—national emblem, tourist spectacle, and seemingly immovable fact—become a measure of everything the family is asked to accept as natural.Roll Back the Mountains compresses a novel’s emotional range into a lean, charged sequence of scenes. Ralph Tharayil’s prose moves between lyric intensity and blunt comedy, refusing a stable border between childhood and adulthood, tenderness and resentment, homeland and elsewhere. As the siblings test the stories they have inherited, the book exposes the exclusions beneath an immaculate national image and the violence hidden inside ordinary language. What emerges is not a conventional migration narrative but a startling family polyphony: intimate, rebellious, and determined to imagine belonging after the landscape has been cleared away.