Speaking Tiger Books has acquired the Indian publishing rights to Love the Dark Days, a memoir by writer and Guardian Media journalist Ira Mathur, from Peepal Tree Press in the UK.
Speaking Tiger Books is an independent publishing company based in New Delhi. Founded in September 2014, the company publishes a diverse list comprising quality fiction and non-fiction from South Asia and the rest of the world. The list includes veterans and exciting new voices—among them, Nayantara Sahgal, Shanta Gokhale, Jerry Pinto, Wendy Doniger, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Mark Tully, Ravish Kumar, Ruskin Bond, Nandita Haksar, Harsh Mander, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Mamang Dai, Salma, Easterine Kire, Gulzar, Madhavi Menon, Swapna Liddle, Devaki Jain, Selma Carvalho, and Omair Ahmad. Its authors have won or been on the shortlists of almost all major literary prizes, including the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Crossword Book Award, the Hindu Literature Prize, the DSC Prize, the JCB Prize, and the Tata Literature Live Awards.
Speaking Tiger also publishes books for children and young adults under its Talking Cub imprint, with authors like Paro Anand, Andaleeb Wajid, Bulbul Sharma, Ranjit Lal, Subhadra Sengupta, Bijal Vachharajani, Ashok Rajagopalan, and Shabnam Minwalla.
Set in Trinidad and St Lucia, Love the Dark Days follows the story of a girl, Poppet, born of mixed Hindu-Muslim parentage in post-independence India. Growing up in silk-swathed splendour and with her grandmother’s prejudices of class and race, she is also the dark child in her family, a feeling of unbelonging repeated when her family migrates to multicultural Trinidad, meeting Indian people, several generations away from India, with a very different sense of themselves. She begins writing about her experiences to try to make sense of them. In her darkest hour, she meets Derek Walcott, who encourages her to leave the past behind and reinvent herself. All this takes place in a society suffering an attempted coup by Muslim extremists and a rising crime rate with reported incidents of spectacular brutality. Can Poppet, through her writing, examine each broken shard of her shattered family relations and reassemble them into a new shape in a new world? Can she make sense of herself about her family and the Trinidadian family she marries into and grow enough to achieve the courage it takes simply to be human? Raw, unflinching, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days is an intricate tapestry that has Poppet’s story at its heart.
Mathur is an award-winning India-born Trinidadian multimedia journalist. Her memoir, Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree Press, 2022), won the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the overall prize. It was also named among the best biographies of 2022 by the UK Guardian. In 2021, Mathur was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award for a draft novel on Nina Simone. She is Guardian Media’s longest-running columnist and journalist and has freelanced for the UK Guardian and the BBC. She holds degrees in literature (Trent University, Canada) and law (University of London), a master’s in international journalism (City University, London) and a diploma in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, UK Guardian. Her body of journalism is available on www.irasroom.org
Recognition
The memoir has won the Caribbean’s top literary prize, the OCM Bocas Non-Fiction Prize for Literature 2022. Past winners include Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Booker Prize winner Marlon James, and Costa Prize winner Monique Roffey.
The UK Guardian billed it among the top memoirs of 2022.
Reviews
“Love the Dark Days is a troubled and troubling book, a heady brew that stays with you.”–The Observer ( UK)
“This brave and inspiring feminist critique of patriarchy and gender oppression set in Trinidad-- framed by the delusional greed and grandeur of colonial India and a weekend in St. Lucia spent with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott—has terrific promise as a biting movie adaptation for the #MeToo era.”–Etan Vlessing, Hollywood Reporter
“One of the most beautiful books I have read for a long time.”–Michael Portillo, Times Radio-UK
“A blaze of a book, astonishing, colonial, post-colonial, modern and post-modern-a Caribbean feminist #metoo memoir that examines inherited patriarchal damage of women and societal norms brought from the Old World to the New. This exquisitely written book examines familial love and fateful blood ties while scrutinising, with compassion, a flawed patriarch and Magnus too, Derek Walcott. Mathur deftly yokes together parallel worlds, colonial India and post-colonial Trinidad. Both worlds are dark, and both worlds hurt women. A memoir like this has never torn itself out of the Caribbean.”—Monique Roffey Winner of Costa Book Award 2020
“A moving post-colonial book about mothers and daughters of India.”–Anita Rani- Women’s Hour, BBC, UK
“Ira Mathur takes the reader deep into the darkest spaces of her family history. Relentlessly honest, she tells a story of dispossession, patriarchy, passion and the wounds of a divided inheritance. Moving from pre-Independence India to Trinidad and London, we see the growing pains of the author as she decodes her relationships with her glamorous parents, her beautiful piano-playing authoritative grandmother and her siblings. In a world between poverty and privilege, she is guided by Derek Walcott, and Naipaul is ever-present. Ultimately, she must find her own voice, truth, and reconciliation. A window into a world rich in history that few know about. A compelling read.”–Shrabani Basu, author of Victoria & Abdul
“I was transported by this gem of a memoir, written over even years by an award-winning, Indian-born journalist, dubbed the “Jon Snow” of Trinidad. Monique Roffey is spot on when she calls it a “blaze of a book.” set in her home nation, but also in St Lucia, India, and London, it’s a multi-layered account of a woman growing to feminist maturity while grappling with the ongoing traumas that result from her turbulent childhood. With many memorable characters, including her formidable grandmother Burrimummy, it also features Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, a mentor of her work.”–Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller, UK
“A compelling memoir of the binding power of love and the liberating beauty of forgiveness.”–Earl Lovelace, Trinidadian novelist and playwright, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize
“Glorious writing full of hard-won wisdom. A transcendent memoir about extremes of love and hate, princely wealth, and the rebellious, righteous poor. I loved it.”–Maggie Gee, the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL)
“The stretch from a Mughal empire ancestry to the arrangements between the Mountbatten set and the Nawab of Savanur, the treachery and false promises of a dismantled empire are all channelled through the annoyed, disinherited Burrimummy. We see Trinidad through an experienced journalist’s eyes, Walcott and Naipaul.”–Alan Mahar, novelist and former publisher
“What marvellous and heartrending crossroads multiplied during the twentieth century. Between east, west, north, and south, many kinds of ancient and untold modes of modern, from “man” and “woman” to vulnerable beings of imagination and heart ... Over the years, I have witnessed Ira Mathur navigating an all too human writer’s life; I have yearned for her to put something of her beauty, wisdom and pain into print. Here it is. Stranger and more compelling than any fantasy, here we are.” –Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Winner of the Forward Prize 2016
“Love the Dark Days is an absorbing and illuminating work of memoir, which manages to straddle continents and epochs while retaining a tight focus on the vibrant characters who link and inhabit them. It is questing and self-questioning, and admirably understanding the inextricability of the past and the present.”–James Scudamore, novelist, winner of the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award, Costa First Novel Award shortlist
“One of the most powerful and exciting new voices in contemporary literature. Love the Dark Days is an extraordinary, multi-layered memoir, drawing threads from the colonial past into a moving, contemporary story of fragile relationships. Ira Mathur is a real find.”–UK David Haviland, publisher, editor and writer.
“Born in the post-colonial era to a pale-skinned Muslim mother of royal antecedents and a bourgeois Hindu father, an army man of high ranking, Ira is a child of religious, colour, class and geopolitical conflict. She is then transposed into Tobago life, and later on, she attends boarding school in England before settling in Trinidad as a grownup. Her estate is one of inter-generational violence, micro- and macro-political aggressions, and devastating power plays.”–Teresa White, Trinidad Guardian
“The torturous Indian childhood, ignored (at best) by two generations of mothers caring more about one’s springboard into society than one’s bored offspring, is connected to the chilling end, the consequences of accepting motherhood that neither one’s parent nor grandparent risked, by the small strands of the grownup, finished and accomplished writer, in St Lucia, in the shadow of the Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, mashing up his stove and his memory and finally asserting herself … if only in these small links that may go unnoticed and unappreciated. Indeed, the reader has to go back to these interludes at the end of the story to appreciate how well they work to connect the book in the hand of the reader to the voice of the writer. “Remarkable” might be too weak a word; “enviable” might be better.”–BC Pires, Newsday (T&T)
