When I Hit You Meena Kandasamy by Meena Kandasamy 9781628729962, 1628729961 instant download after payment.

Though a harrowing story, Meena Kandasamy’s writing is also funny, tender and lyrical. When I Hit You is smart, fierce, and courageous. "Meena Kandasamy's vivid, sharp and precise writing makes a triumph of When I Hit You" (The Guardian).

Seduced by politics, poetry and an enduring dream of building a better world together, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor. Moving with him to a rain-washed coastal town, she swiftly learns that what for her is a bond of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of an obedient wife, bullying her and devouring her ambition of being a writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape.

"Kandasamy's brilliant and at times brutally funny narrator leads the reader through her emotional journey...This is a story that could take place in any culture at any time period. What makes this novel unique is the feisty voice of the narrator and the rich details of her intellectual interests and her husband's leftist politics in contemporary India."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Smart, fierce and courageous When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.