HOUSE CALLED ASKIVAL - Hardcover

Glover, Merryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1908754591 ISBN 13: 9781908754592

Verlag: FREIGHT BOOKS, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

A stunning and beguiling debut set in India, with a dual narrative, one in the past just after Partition, and the other in the present day

James Connor is a man who, burdened with guilt following a tragic event in his youth, has dedicated his life to serving India. Ruth Connor is his estranged daughter who, as a teenager, always knew she came second to her parents' missionary vocation and rebelled, with equally tragic consequences. After 24 years away, Ruth finally returns to Askival, the family home in Mussoorie, a remote hill station in the Northern State of Uttarakhand, to tend to her dying father. There she must face the past and confront her own burden of guilt if she is to cross the chasm that has grown between them. In this extraordinary and assured debut, Merryn Glover draws on her own upbringing as a child of missionary parents in Uttarakhand to create a sensitive, complex, and epic journey through the sights, sounds, and often violent history of India from Partition to the present day.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Merryn Glover was born in a former Royal Palace in Kathmandu and brought up in South Asia. Her writing has been published in newspapers and broadcast on radio. She is the author of the full length play The Long Way Home. This is her first novel. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A House Called Askival

By Merryn Glover

Freight Books

Copyright © 2014 Merryn Glover
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-908754-59-2

CHAPTER 1

When Ruth finally returned to Mussoorie, it was late August, late monsoon, late in the day. Mist was rolling up from the valley like a brooding spirit, seeping into the hollows between hills, crawling over boulders, drowning trees. From her open window on the bus she felt it slip over her arm, smelling of damp earth and woodsmoke and dread.

Above, the town lay splattered across the ridge like the contents of an upended rubbish bin. It was bigger than before and even more crowded. Buildings shouldered each other along the steep slivers of road – restaurants and trinket shops, grey hovels and multi-storey concrete blocks – all bound together by a tangle of wires, washing lines and battered signs. Below them, on the forested slopes, the colonial bungalows hunkered under their rusting roofs as if trying to shut out the coarseness of the modern age, while Victorian relics, like the bank and the Masonic Lodge, sat forlorn and streaked with damp. Even the newer hotels, with their giant billboards and balcony rooms, seemed tired from the holiday makers and the relentless rain.

She got off the bus at Paramount Picture House, with its sodden film posters peeling off the walls and its broken ticket window. So unchanged, it could have been preserved in formaldehyde, like the specimens in the Bio lab at school squeezed into their watery yellow graves: a shrew, a cobra, a heart. They'd made her skin crawl, as had the cases of beetles stabbed into place, and the stuffed pheasant, gathering dust and losing feathers.

An old coolie approached her with a gnarled hand and an uncertain smile, revealing one brown tooth. At her nod, he stuffed her backpack into his basket and followed her silently up the narrow road through the bazaar. She felt like a fugitive, an exorcised spirit crawling back.

It was unsettling how the place had gone on without her, lending a feeling of callous indifference, betrayal even. So much was just as before: the row of shawl shops, the Tibetan stalls, the Hotel Hill Queen with its five floors built into the cliff. Even the tin shacks at the side of the road were still perched on their stilts like a row of rusting herons that had lost the will to migrate.

But some things were different. The hole-in-the wall booths that used to offer long distance calls now included internet access and mobile top-up; alongside the garish postcards of gods and Bollywood film stars a new pantheon of American celebrities jostled for space; and the old racks of walking-sticks and macramé pot-hangers were replaced with microwaves, televisions and cappuccino machines. Ruth wasn't sure which felt worse: the things that were exactly as she had left them or the ones that had changed.

Godiwala Plastics, half way up the bazaar, was still bristling with the same array of buckets and brooms and soap dishes, but it was the blue basin on the front step that halted her. It was exactly like the one from the foot-washing scene in The Gospel of Jyoti, the musical in her last year at school that had begun with such promise but ended in ruin.

On the curve past the Hindu temple the monkeys were ravaging the offerings on the front steps. They squabbled and cuffed each other, shrieked, scampered up the electricity poles and over window frames, leaving rice and flowers spilled across the road and into the gutters. The streets smelled dank. For two months the rain had soaked into the rubbish and dung, the blackened fruit, the roadside mud. The place was swollen with it. Shops sagged, their signboards curling, doors jamming, bre

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FREIGHT BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1908754591
• ISBN 13: 9781908754592
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar