This assured novel records the different registers in the complex inner life of an extended family. Like the nation itself, the strict hierarchy of the joint- family home can be dysfunctional, and yet it is this home that often provides unexpected relief and succor to the vulnerable within its walls.
As certainties dissolve, endings lead to new beginnings. Structured with the warp of memory and the weft of conjoined lives, the narrative follows middle India, even as it records the struggles for individual growth, with successive generations trying to break out of the stranglehold of the all-encompassing Indian family.
Ebbing and flowing like the waves of a pandemic, the novel is a clear-eyed chronicle of the tragedies of India's encounter with the Corona virus, the cynicism and despair that accompanied it, and the resilience and strength of the human spirit.
A co-founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Gokhale is committed to supporting translations and curetting literary dialogues across languages and cultures. She was conferred the Centenary National Award for Literature by the Asam Sahitya Sabha in Guwahati in 2017. She won the Sushila Devi Literature Award for her novel Things to Leave Behind, which also received the Best Fiction Jury Award at the Valley of Words Literature Festival 2017, and was on the longlist for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award. The Blind Matriarch is her twentieth book.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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