In commemoration of the 175th Anniversary of Indian Arrival in the Americas this May, the Rajkumari Center, GOPIO, Jahajee Sisters Artists & Writers Groups present a program launching the latest novel by celebrated Indo-Caribbean (British-Trinidadian) writer Lakshmi Persaud. Persaud will be reading from her fifth novel, Daughters of Empire, on Sunday, May 27, at the Queens Museum of Art.
Daughters of Empire (Peepal Tree Press, 2012) is a sweeping saga of migration and the challenges it presents. This is a story about sisters Ishani, who stays in Trinidad with the family business, and Amira, who migrates with her family to England. Ishani, the older sister full of bluff certainty, is a good-hearted manipulator determined to extend her influence across the seas. Soul-searching Amira, on the other hand, wonders how she will raise three daughters outside the support of her extended family, and whether the values of her traditional Hindu upbringing can provide her children with the means to negotiate the seductions of aggressive British individualism. As a middle-class family able to live in prosperous Mill-Hill, the Vidhurs face little of the hostility experienced by other Caribbean and South Asian migrants, but they too discover that even those with the very best colonial educations may never quite fit in, especially with those who see only color. An examination of education, class, and race, this novel provide a unique look at Caribbean Diaspora.
Lakshmi Persaud is the highly acclaimed author of Daughters of Empire, Raise the Lanterns High, For the Love of my Name, Sastra, and Butterfly in the Wind. As an Indo-Caribbean novelist born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1939Her writings explore themes of Indo-Caribbean experience and cultural change. As a writer with an elegant and poetic style, her four books are widely used in post-colonial and Caribbean literature courses and in book clubs. The Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University in the UK has established a Research Fellowship in her name. She had an academic career before turning to writing novels. She holds a B.A. (Hons) and Ph.D degrees from Queen’s University, Belfast.
For more information, see http://www.queensmuseum.org/9939/book-launch-daughters-of-empire-by-lakshmi-persaud and http://www.lakshmipersaud.com/daughters.html
For purchasing information, see http://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Empire-Lakshmi-Persaud/dp/1845231872
