What (am I currently reading)?

I am currently reading the memoir Love the Dark Days by Ira Mathur.  An account of a fascinating life, told through the stories of (more than) 3 generations of one family. 

Book Blurb (taken from https://www.irasroom.org/ )

From award-winning journalist Ira Mathur, Love The Dark Days is about accrued intergenerational damage between mothers and daughters in post-colonial worlds.

This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut centres on a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender.

The Victorian India elephant in the room in Ira Mathur’s silk-swathed memoir Love The Dark Days is in chains. By the time calypso replaces the Raj in post-colonial Trinidad, the chains are off three generations of daughters and mothers in a family in their New World exile. 

But they are still stuck in place and enduring insecurity and threats, seen and unseen.

Set in India, England, Trinidad and a weekend in St Lucia, with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree Press) follows the story of a girl, Poppet, of mixed middle-class Hindu and Elite Muslim parentage from post-independent India to her family’s migration to post-colonial Trinidad. 

Profoundly raw, unflinching, layered, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days reassembles the story of a disintegrating Empire.

ISBN 9781845235352

Pages 230

Royal size paperback edition with French flaps

Why (have I chosen to read it)?

Because I loved the sound of this memoir, and reading about lives lived so differently to mine is always interesting. 

While (I am reading it)

I’ve been for some gentle walks enjoying the continuing warm weather that so many of us in Europe are experiencing.  It is cold at night though, so the cows are down in the valley meadows now.   I do love the changing seasons here! 

All the best, Emma