The Seduction of Silence - Softcover

Le Hunte, Bem

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060573686 ISBN 13: 9780060573683

Publisher: HarperOne, 2004

Synopsis

Follow Five Generations of One Remarkable Indian Family on a Quest for Enlightenment.

About this title

About the Author:

Bem Le Hunte was born in Calcutta to an Indian mother and British father. She grew up in India and London, studied anthropology at Cambridge, and worked as a university lecturer and copywriter before moving to the Himalayas to have a baby and write this book. She now lives in California with her husband and two sons.

From Publishers Weekly:

Sydney-based writer Le Hunte makes her American debut with this story of several generations of Indian women who span decades and continents in their quest for enlightenment. In the 1930s, the sage and wealthy landowner and patriarch, Aakash, and his son, Ram, head for the highest mountain peaks in search of spiritual awakening, leaving behind Aakash's daughter, Tulsi Devi, and his rigidly traditional wife, Jyoti Ma, at the family's Himalayan farm. Tulsi Devi would have liked to go on a spiritual quest of her own, but instead is sent to a convent school at Lahore, where a traumatic incident lands her in a loveless marriage. She manages to imbue her daughter, Rohini, with a more independent spirit. Rohini becomes a doctor, but she also marries an Englishman, a move that leaves her estranged from all her family-except, that is, for the spirit of her grandfather Aakash, who communes with her regularly and guides her on her own spiritual path. The magic realist touches scattered throughout the novel have won Le Hunte comparisons to Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie, but Le Hunte has a snappy, more commercial style (when Rohini tells her pregnant daughter to stop complaining, the acid-tongued daughter thinks, "Thanks, Mama. Can you remember to tell me your worst birth stories just before I go into labor? We'll put some time aside, OK?"). Those who are not yet weary of multigenerational women's sagas will appreciate Le Hunte's fluid storytelling and vivid scene setting.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0060573686
• ISBN 13: 9780060573683
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416