Book Details:
Author: Ira Mathur
Release Date: 1st September 2022Series:
Genre: Memoir
Format: E-book
Pages: 232 pages
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.
Blurb:
This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut centres on a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender. The Victorian India elephant in the room in Ira Mathur’s silk-swathed memoir Love The Dark Days is in chains. By the time calypso replaces the Raj in post-colonial Trinidad, the chains are off three generations of daughters and mothers in a family in their New World exile. But they are still stuck in place and enduring insecurity and threats, seen and unseen.
Set in India, England, Trinidad and a weekend in St Lucia, with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree Press) follows the story of a girl, Poppet, of mixed middle-class Hindu and Elite Muslim parentage from post-independent India to her family’s migration to post-colonial Trinidad.
Profoundly raw, unflinching, layered, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days reassembles the story of a disintegrating Empire.
Review
Love The Dark Days by Ira Mathur is an emotionally gripping, complex, hard-hitting yet beautiful and creatively written memoir exploring familial ties in a dysfunctional setting. In this remarkable book, the author also explores the labyrinthine effects of migration and racism as the main story unfolds making it a remarkably complex, and thus, a very engaging read.
I loved reading this book because it had so much to offer to its reader in terms of emotional depth, varied perspectives on the problems that are faced by many and, in the end, a ray of hope, that we all are unwittingly looking for.
I’d strongly recommend this book to all memoir readers because this book is one of a kind and the writing is absolutely brilliant.
The Reading Bud 