Love the Dark Days
From award-winning journalist Ira Mathur, Love The Dark Days is about accrued intergenerational damage between mothers and daughters in post-colonial worlds.
Love The Dark Days won the 2023 Bocas prize for Literature (non-fiction) and is listed among the U.K. Guardian’s best memoirs of 2022.
This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut centres on a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender.
The Victorian India elephant in the room in Ira Mathur's silk-swathed memoir Love The Dark Days is in chains. By the time calypso replaces the Raj in post-colonial Trinidad, the chains are off three generations of daughters and mothers in a family in their New World exile.
But they are still stuck in place and enduring insecurity and threats, seen and unseen.
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.
ISBN 9781845235352
Pages 230
Royal size paperback edition with French flaps
Price £12.99
7 JUL 2022 Peepal Tree Press
Rights enquiries: Hannah Bannister hannah@peepaltreepress.com
Interviews and media: Ira Mathur
irasroom@gmail.com
Reviews : Love the Dark Days
“One of the best books I’ve read in a long time. A beautiful beautiful book.”
Michael Portillo, Times Radio
“Love The Dark Days is a troubled and troubling book, a heady brew that stays with you.”
The Observer
“A transcendent memoir about extremes of love and hate, princely wealth, and the rebellious, righteous poor. I loved it.''
Maggie Gee
"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 of the Year 2020
"Mathur brings alive startling episodes from her technicolour life, proving truth is not just stranger but often more compelling than fiction. There is a sense of her burning through her days, reckless, raw, and passionate. For all that, she offers the embers of her life with a rarely found wisdom. An exquisite, compassionate, and necessary book.""
Amanda Smyth, longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, 2022
“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
"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 (2019) Winner of the Forward Prize for best poetry collection, with Measures of Expatriation in 2016
“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
“Love the Dark Days is an absorbing and illuminating work of memoir, which manages to straddle continents and epochs while retaining tight focus on the vibrant characters who link and inhabit them. It is questing and self-questioning, and admirably understanding of the inextricability of the past and the present”
James Scudamore
Novelist, winner of 2007 Somerset Maugham Award , Costa First Novel Award shortlist
''A compelling memoir of the binding power of love and the liberating beauty of forgiveness.'' Earl Lovelace, Novelist, Winner of OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, (2012 Commonwealth Writers Prize )
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 dismantled empire is 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
"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."
David Haviland, editor and writer
Speaking Tiger Books acquires publishing rights for Love the Dark Days
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.
Ira Mathur
Ira Mathur is an Indian-born Trinidadian award winning multimedia journalist with degrees in Literature, Law and Journalism. www.irasroom.org .She is currently the Trinidad Guardian's longest-running columnist and has freelanced for The Guardian (UK) and the BBC. She is also the current President of the Media Association of Trinidad & Tobago ((MATT)
IN 2021 Mathur was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award for her unpublished novel ''Touching Dr Simone.''
In 2019 Mathur was longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. An excerpt of her memoir is anthologized in Thicker Than Water, (Peekash Press, 2018).
In 2018 she shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize, the Lorian Hemmingway (short story) and Small Axe Literary Competition.
Mathur gained diplomas in creative writing at the University of East Anglia/Guardian with James Scudamore & Gillian Slovo and Maggie Gee at the Faber Academy. ( 2015/2016)