We encounter a variety of travellers in Everything the Light Touches: Young Indian woman Shai travels to northeastern India where she meets indigenous people and rediscovers methods of existence that realign and revitalise her. Evelyn, a Cambridge student from the Edwardian era who is motivated by Goethe's teachings on plants, sets off on a quest to find the Lower Himalayas' sacred forests. Botanist and taxonomist Linnaeus famously said, "God creates; Linnaeus organises," and he also oversaw a 1732 voyage to Lapland. And Goethe himself developed his views while travelling through Italy in the 1780s for a revelatory essay that urged a reevaluation of our predisposition to break down plants?and the entire world?into unchanging components.The novel, which draws heavily on scientific concepts, delves into a maelstrom of contrasts between contemporary India and its colonial past, urban and rural life, capitalism and long-standing customs of generosity and thanks, script and "song and stone," and many other topics. The struggle between fixed and categorising viewpoints and liberating and integrating viewpoints is at the core of the work. The people and places that the Light Touches bring together seem at first to be out of time and space from one another, but they are brought together with stunning and amusing freshness. We learn, however, that everything resonates and is connected.