When I met Canada-based writer M G Vassanji during his visit to New Delhi, he was rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . He had first read it as a student about 35 years ago and had recently returned to the classics of his youth. Before that, the 76-year-old author had been rereading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace , which kept him occupied for a couple of months.

Did Dostoevsky hold up in a second reading? “In some parts, yes. In some parts, no,” says Vassanji, who has won the Giller Prize two times. “I think it’s a bit overwritten. Much of the ranting could be cut. But towards the end it raises the right questions, the moral questions that affected me at that age, and they are so important.”

It is a fitting place to begin, because moral questions, and the turbulence of history that forces them on us, sit at the heart of his new novel, The Apparition .

A light in the sky

The book opens in the Delhi Sultanate’s declining years under the ageing Alauddin Khilji.…