First published 2014
Ritwik escapes his brutal childhood in Calcutta and arrives in England seeking a fresh start. The young man carries deep wounds from years of squalor and abuse, particularly from his toxic relationship with his mother. In London, he finds shelter with Anne Cameron, an eighty-six-year-old woman who needs his care in return for a place to stay. Anne is fragile and damaged herself, creating an unlikely bond between two broken souls. As Ritwik tries to rebuild his life, he writes his own story about an Englishwoman living in Bengal during India's first partition in the early 1900s. His fiction becomes both escape and mirror. Then one night in the rough streets of King's Cross, he encounters Zafar bin Hashm, a mysterious and sophisticated man who will change everything. When the present collides with the past across multiple lives and time periods, Ritwik's carefully constructed new world begins to crumble. The novel moves between 1970s and 80s India, 1990s England, and colonial Bengal, exploring how displaced people search for belonging and meaning through the stories they tell themselves and others.
Genres: historical-fiction, abuse, 20th-century, contemporary, adult-fiction, biographical-fiction, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: broken-characters, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Bengal, Calcutta, England, India, King's Cross, London
Period: 1900s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s
192 pages · Kindle Edition · Not Avail
Content warnings: abuse, mental-illness