Difficult Daughters - Softcover

Kapur, Manju

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571195695 ISBN 13: 9780571195695

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1999

Synopsis

Set around the time of Partition and written with absorbing intelligence and sympathy, Difficult Daughters is the story of a woman torn between family duty, the desire for education, and illicit love. Virmati, a young woman born in Amritsar into an austere and high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor--a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Virmati, installs her in his home (alongside his furious first wife) and helps her towards further studies in Lahore, is small consolation to her scandalised family. Or even to Virmati, who finds that the battle for her own independence has created irrevocable lines of partition and pain around her.

Difficult Daughters was short-listed for the Crossword Book Award in India.

About this title

About the Author:

Manju Kapur was born in Amritsar. She is a teacher of English literature at Miranda House College, Delhi University, and has four children. Researching and writing Difficult Daughters, her first novel, took her five years.

Review:

"This is a skilful, enticing first novel by an Indian writer who prefers reality to magic realism. Manju Kapur's sensuous pages re-create an intimate world where family groups sleep in the open air on the roof and wash themselves in the yard in the dewy cool of morning, where love-making is furtive and urgent because another wife may be listening, and women's lives move to a complex choreography of cooking, washing, weaving and mending, growing, picking, chopping and blending...This book offers a completely imagined, aromatic, complex world, a rare thing in first novels." --Maggie Gee, Sunday Times

"Kapur's book is steeped in exquisite melancholy." --Guardian

"Kapur writes with quiet intelligence and wry, deadpan humour. Set against the bloody backdrop of Partition, this is a powerful portrait of a society where shame is more important than grief, pragmatism goes hand-in-hand with superstition, and a pregnant wife has to share a bed with her mother-in-law." --Observer

"An urgent and important story about family and partitions and love." --Vikram Chandra

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0571195695
• ISBN 13: 9780571195695
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256