As Sweet as Honey
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In her latest novel, Indira Ganesan, a writer often likened to Arundhati Roy and Chitra Divakaruni, gives us an enchanting story of family life that is a dance of love and grief and rebirth set on a gorgeous island in the Indian Ocean.
The island is filled with exotic flora and fauna and perfumed air. A large family compound is presided over by a benign, stalwart grandmother. There is a very tall South Asian heroine with the astonishing un-Indian name of Meterling, who has found love at last in the shape of a short, round, elegant Englishman who wears white suits. There are also numerous aunts, uncles, and young cousins—among them, Mina, grown now, and telling this story of a marriage ceremony that ends with a widowed bride who, in the midst of her grief, discovers she is pregnant.
While enjoying their own games and growing pains, Mina and her young cousins follow every nuance of gossip, trying to puzzle out what is going on with their favorite aunt, particularly when the groom’s cousin arrives from England and begins to woo her. As Meterling—torn between Eastern and Western ideas of love and family, duty and loyalty—struggles to make a new life, we become as entranced with this family, its adventures and complications, as Mina is.
And with her we celebrate a time and place where, although sometimes difficult, life was for the most part as sweet as honey.
BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from India Ganesan's Inheritance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her third novel (after Inheritance), Ganesan returns to the island of Pi in the Indian Ocean, "the tiniest crescent-shaped bindi above the eyebrows to Sri Lanka's tear." Mina, now grown, tells the childhood story of her Aunt Meterling's unlikely marriage to a stout Englishman named Archer; that she was tall and he short was only the beginning of their differences. Vows were barely exchanged she in a sari, he in a white suit before the groom dropped dead. Amid her grief, Meterling discovered she was pregnant, a joyful, but problematic turn in her world of tradition. At the time, young Mina and her cousins barely understood the domestic drama unfolding before them; every overheard word was a puzzle. Meterling inherits Archer's fields and fortune in England, but is unfit to visit them when beckoned by Archer's distant cousin Simon. Instead, he comes to her and soon falls in love with his cousin's former bride. Ganesan spins the lush magic of island life out into the real world. Repercussions of colonialism echo for generations, but the women of Pi find opportunity in the tumult. In this enclosed world, Meterling was the first to dream a different life and her story inspires Mina's intimate retelling.