[2] A literary fiction, the novel is set in the Indian subcontinent that follows the interconnected lives of its characters searching for true intimacy.

In the middle of the 20th century, Girija’s government job takes them to the remote, wildly beautiful Andaman Islands, a penal colony under the British Empire that newly independent India is trying to figure out what to do with.

Faultline delves into the lives of Mary, a Burmese woman who was Girija and Chanda’s housekeeper, and her son, a political prisoner in Burma who has renamed himself Plato.

Thapa’s travels lead to the final section, Snow Desert, and the story of Apo, the aged leader of an isolated village in the icy Karakoram Mountains, in the no-man’s land between Pakistan and India.

[11] The jury for the Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature, when speaking of Latitudes of Longing, described the writing style as ‘deeply anchored in the culture of this region, where the landscape, the sea, the mountains and the main characters (two newlyweds, a melancholic yeti, a geologist, a turtle...) seem to invent a genre in itself: the "fiction of nature"[12], a description Swarup agrees with.

[13] 'This is an ecological novel where humans, nature, geology, geopolitics and religion intertwine, where the stories seem to arise organically along a fault line that shakes the earth and everything it contains.

Woven into four loosely related narratives, it tells the story of different couples who challenge prescribed social norms and yet their love reaches the divine height in the sense of being eternal.