Ira Mathur is an Indian born multi media journalist living in Trinidad: www.irasroom.org
-The Guardian UK
Love The Dark Days listed among the best memoirs/biographies for 2022
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/03/the-best-memoirs-and-biographies-of-2022
-The Observer- UK
"Love the Dark Days is a troubled and troubling book, a heady brew that stays with you." –
Hollywood Reporter.
"This brave and inspiring feminist critique of patriarchy and gender oppression has wonderful promise as a biting movie adaptation for the #MeToo era."
-Michael Portillo - Times Radio-
"A beautiful, beautiful book … a wonderful read." –
-Monique Roffey ( Winner of the Costa Book Of The Year Award 2020)-
"A blaze of a book, that examines familial love and fateful blood ties while scrutinising, with compassion, a flawed patriarch and magus too, Derek Walcott. Mathur deftly yokes together parallel worlds, colonial India and post-colonial Trinidad. Both worlds are dark, and both worlds hurt women. — Monique Roffey Winner of Costa Book Award 2020
- Anita Rani- Women's Hour. 'A moving post-colonial book about mothers and daughters of India.'
—Shrabani Basu Author of Victoria & Abdul
"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 two siblings. In a world between poverty and privilege, she is guided by Derek Walcott, and Naipaul is ever-present. Ultimately, she has to find her own voice, her own truth and reconciliation. A window into a world rich in history that few know about. A compelling read."
The Bookseller
"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 ac- count 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, who was a mentor of her work.
Love The Dark Days was listed among the Guardian UK top memoirs for 2022
Earl Lovelace
"A compelling memoir of the binding power of love and the liberating beauty of forgiveness." —Earl Lovelace
Guardian ( TT)
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.
Newsday (TT)
"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."
DESCRIPTION – LOVE THE DARK DAYS
DESCRIPTION
Set in India, England, Trinidad and a weekend in St Lucia, with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree Press) follows the story of a girl, Poppet, of mixed middle-class Hindu and Elite Muslim parentage from post-independent India to her family's migration to post-colonial Trinidad. Profoundly raw, unflinching, layered, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days reassembles the story of a disintegrating Empire.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
IRA MATHUR is an Indian-born Trinidadian award-winning multimedia journalist with degrees in Literature, Law and Journalism. She is currently the Trinidad Guardian's longest-running columnist and has freelanced for
The Guardian (UK) and the BBC. In 2021 Mathur was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award for her unpublished novel Touching Dr Simone. Mathur gained diplomas in creative writing at the University of East Anglia/Guardian and The Faber Academy. She launched her debut Love The Dark Days (Peepal Tree Press ) in London in July 2022 at Waterstones in Victoria and The Nehru Centre
PRODUCT DETAILS
Book Title: Love the Dark Days | Author: Ira Mathur | Publisher: Peepal Tree Press | US Release Date: July 7th, 2022 ISBN: 978-1-84523-535-2 | Genre: Memoir | Format: Royal size paperback edition with French flaps Pages: 230 | US Distribution: Independent Publishers Group - IPG | Price: $19.95/ £12.99
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