What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin

'This is a captivating jewel of a novel by a seasoned and sophisticated writer. This is a novel whose many themes and characters have been orchestrated, for the most part, with great confidence and without sacrificing complexity. This narrative about fathers estranged from daughters, mothers from sons, husbands from wives, becomes a metaphor for the turmoil and flux we call history, without always speaking of that history directly.

(Oct.'This is a story about estrangement and division. and Canada rights sold in Germany, Italy, France. 6-city author tour simultaneous publication in the U.K.

Baldwin achieves an artistic triumph on two levels, capturing the churning political and religious history of modern India and Pakistan as she explores memorable transformations: of Satya, from a dominating force in her family to a lonely outsider of Sardarji, from an idealistic, ambitious engineer to a hardened, more realistic civil servant and finally, of Roop, from an arrogant, self-centered daughter to a selfless wife and mother who becomes the backbone of her family. As headstrong Satya, more involved in her husband's affairs than most of her peers, and demure Roop, trained to exercise traditional feminine wiles, battle for Sardarji's favor and the children Roop soon produces, Sardarji is increasingly distracted by the furor over independence and the future of the Indian state. Baldwin, who grew up in India, skillfully creates an exotic milieu where women are sheltered from the outside world and struggle for influence over their families.

Intensely atmospheric, the novel contains lyrical descriptions of daily life in a village with dusty fields of maize and clusters of homes the cinnamon, anise and fennel smell of Satya's kitchen Sardarji's Oxfordian attire and his spindly-legged English furniture. The dramatic and brutal story behind the 1947 partition of India, as played out in the region of Punjab, is the compelling backdrop for this stunning first novel that entwines the fate of three remarkable characters: Sardarji, a wealthy Sikh landowner whose heart is in India, but whose head is in England Satya, his constantly scheming, feisty wife who lives for her husband but cannot give him children and Roop, Sardarji's second, much younger wife, married for the express purpose of providing the family with an heir.

What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin