"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
"I was transported by this gem of a memoir, written over seven years by an award-winning, Indian-born journalist, dubbed the “Jon Snow” of Trinidad. 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, who was a mentor of her work.” – Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
Set in India, England, 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 as a way of trying 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 it into a new shape in a new world? Can she make sense of herself in relation both to her own 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.