What The Body Remembers Shauna Singh Baldwin by Shauna Singh Baldwin 9780385496056, 0385496052 instant download after payment.

“A richly textured often poetic story… the gruelling uses to which women’s bodies and spirits are put, and their abuses at the hands of men – combines with the political analogue of India’s struggle for independence to produce a lush, sensuous drama."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Roop is a sixteen-year-old village girl in the Punjab region of undivided India in 1937 whose family is respectable but poor — her father is deep in debt and her mother is dead. Innocent and lovely, yet afraid she may not marry well, she is elated when she learns she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner, Sardarji, whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him any children. Roop trusts that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister, but their relationship becomes far more ominous and complicated than expected.

“...an impressive first novel, hype or no hype. Baldwin’s passion for re-membering her dis-membered homeland, and her desire to tell women’s version, propel the last half of the novel and make it particularly potent.”  -  Quill & Quire

Deeply imbued with the languages, customs and layered history of colonial India, What The Body Remembers is a powerful combination of historical and domestic drama, marking a promising debut for Shauna Singh Baldwin.