About this ebook
Winner of the 2010 COSTA first novel award Durga. A fourteen-year-old girl, found all alone in a sprawling house in Punjab. Silent, terrified, and the sole suspect in the mass murder of thirteen members of her family. Simran. A whisky-swigging, chain-smoking social worker from Delhi. She is Durga's sole hope, for Simran is the only one who believes that she may be more a victim than a suspect. As Simran tries to unravel the mystery of what really happened that night of the multiple murders, she comes in close and often uncomfortable contact with Jullundur and its people, from Durga's enigmatic tutor Harpreet and his disfigured wife to the picture-perfect high-society Amrinder and her superintendent husband Ramnath. The prejudices she encounters are deep-seated and the secrets manifold. And Simran knows she cannot rest until she has uncovered the whole truth. A chilling first novel that gets to the heart of tradition-bound India.
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About the author
Kishwar Desai is an award-winning author and playwright, who writes both fiction and non-fiction. She worked in television as an anchor and producer for more than twenty years before becoming a writer. She is the chairperson of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, which set up the world's first Partition Museum at Town Hall, Amritsar. She also helped to instal the statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside Westminster in the UK.Desai is the author of Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt (2007). Her novel Witness the Night won the Costa First Novel Award in the UK, in 2010, and was followed by two others: Origins of Love (2012) and Sea of Innocence (2013). The trilogy featuring Simran Singh has since been optioned for a web series. Desai's first work of political non-fiction, Jallianwala Bagh: The Real Story (2018), won critical acclaim and inspired exhibitions on the massacre in India, the UK and New Zealand. She also wrote a play, Manto!, which won the TAG Omega award for Best Play in 1999. In 2019, her play Devika Rani: Goddess of the Silver Screen was successfully staged in venues across India.