Difficult Daughters - Softcover

Kapur, Manju

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571260640 ISBN 13: 9780571260645

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2010

Synopsis

Set around the time of Partition and written with absorbing intelligence and sympathy, Difficult Daughters is the story of a young woman torn between the desire for education and the lure of illicit love. Virmati, a young woman born into a 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 with her studies, 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Manju Kapur lives in New Delhi, where she is a teacher of English literature at Miranda House College, Delhi University. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters, received tremendous international acclaim. Her second novel A Married Woman was called "fluent and witty" in the Independent, while her third, Home, was described as "engaging, glistening with detail and emotional acuity" in the Sunday Times.

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: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0571260640
• ISBN 13: 9780571260645
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288