Inheritance
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In her first novel since her debut with The Journey, Indira Ganesan gives us the story of Sonil, who at fifteen has come to her adored grandmother's house on a paradisiacal island off the coast of India ("a tiny eye, to the teardrop that was Sri Lanka") to mend her shaky health. She has been living on the mainland with her aunts, to whom she was sent by her mother when she was a baby, and she yearns to find out why she was exiled and where her American father might be.
On the island, she spends her time studying Italian with her absentminded uncle . . . talking about boys and clothes with her favorite cousin, Jani . . . spying on her mysteriously distant mother. The gorgeous surroundings--the mango trees, the flowers, the heat, the monkeys--awaken her senses, and ours too, as she settles in for a seemingly endless summer.
Little by little, her spirits revive, and we see Sonil begin to move out of the magical world of her grandmother's compound into the wider life of the island, until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's rejection in a passionate affair with a young American. It is through her feelings for him that she begins to discover the means to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.
Inheritance is a lush, lovely novel that transports us to a timeless place, an exotic island crossroads of many peoples and cultures--an Eden where the drama of love and family, loss and acceptance, still works its powerful and encompassing magic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set on a tiny island off India's southern tip, this lyrical novel is narrated by 15-year-old Sonil, whose coming-of-age is complicated by family secrets. Sonil's emotions are always at fever-pitch, dominated by anger and bitterness toward her mother, Lakshmi, who abandoned her in the care of two aunts after splitting from Sonil's father, an American photographer, when Sonil was six. On sick leave from school in Madras, Sonil visits her adored, levelheaded maternal grandmother on the island, where the family has assembled. Even as she reviles her aloof and perhaps promiscuous mother, Sonil longs for her love: "She consumed me. I felt... that she took my soul, somehow." Partly in rebellion against her, Sonil embarks on an affair with a footloose American, who soon drops her, adding heartache to the welter of her tangled emotions. Ganesan (The Journey) weaves her story in short fragments, evoking an exotic world of a tropical island rendered even more hermetic by family dynamics. Lakshmi is an infuriating character: her purposeful silence seems excessive when she finally reveals the secrets of her past, which are less dramatic than one anticipates. More robust, if exotic, are Raj, Sonil's great-uncle, a turbaned painter who takes opium, and her cousin Jani, who avoids an arranged marriage by entering a convent and then has a baby by a half-mad Christian preacher. In this atmosphere of ironic contrasts (Sonil's world contains both mutilated beggars and mystical healers), Ganesan fashions a witty portrait of a suffocating family set against a lush background that is a veritable naturalistic hymn to India. FYI: Ganesan, a Radcliffe fellow, was a Granta Best Young American Novelist Award finalist.
