Love’s Garden

(27 reviews)

$4.99$18.95

Publication Date: October 27, 2020 – Order Today!

Love’s Garden begins in 1898, when India is ruled by the British, and India’s women are ruled by British masters as well as Indian men. A desperate young widow sacrifices her firstborn child to save herself from ultimate dishonor. She marries a stranger, but her damaged second family pays dearly for this Faustian bargain. Then, an extraordinary atonement, strange liaisons in politics and love—spanning the two world wars and the Indian independence movement—help her descendants heal from this traumatic private history. Love’s Garden demonstrates the strength, resilience, and unbreakable spirit of mothers and daughters navigating layers of oppression, all while the sun is not-so-peacefully setting on British India.

SKU: 978-1-951547-08-0 Category: Tag:

Additional information

Publication Date

October 27, 2020

Format

Perfect Paperback, eBook

ISBN

978-1-951547-08-0, 978-1-951547-09-7

Length

260 pages

Trim

6 x 9 inches

Listen to the Author

Reading at the KGB Bar in New York (virtually).

Reading on the CWW Institute of International Education Benefit Reading, July 24, 2020 (15 minutes in)

Reading from Love’s Garden and Homeland Blues, The Great Indoors Reading Event, New York City, June 19, 2020 (44:44 minutes in)

27 reviews for Love’s Garden

  1. Laura Catherine Brown — author of “Made by Mary”

    Wonderfully dense and wise, with a narrative sweep recalling the work of Dickens, Love’s Garden conveys both characters and ideas with impassioned intelligence. The garden of the title is India, gorgeously portrayed in all its complexity through the personal travails and occasional triumphs of one fragmented family centered on Prem, who struggles to hold her fragile clan together. Bhattacharya’s love for her subjects and for India shines through in her lyrical prose, creating a compelling saga of broken people navigating through a broken world, its brokenness illuminated by beauty and heart, and by the courageous human individuals trying to survive.

  2. Sybil Baker — author of “While You Were Gone”

    A gripping historical novel set in India in the first half of the twentieth century, Love’s Garden is about a young mother’s deal with the devil that sets in motion extraordinary sacrifices, atonements, and twists of fate in three generations of “mothers,” during a time when women struggled to have a say in their lives and that of their children. The novel astutely examines what women will do to protect those they love, and how they survive after devastating loss.

  3. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni — author of “The Forest of Enchantments” and “Before We Visit the Goddess”

    Love’s Garden is a fascinating and well-crafted journey into India’s complex past with characters that will entice you, fill you with indignation, and sometimes break your heart. I particularly enjoyed the stories of the women, who are complicated, brave, headstrong, and impetuous—in other words, deeply human.

  4. Indira Ganesan — author of “The Journey” and “Inheritance”

    From the first chapter of Nandini Bhattacharya’s novel, one recognizes the urgent, unflinching voice of an author who lays bare the political and cultural barriers towards choice faced by women in Ango-Indian society as the subcontinent struggles with the weight of imperialism at the turn of the 20th Century. We follow the lives of women sobered by the limits class, money, and color play as they navigate their world as best they can.

  5. Danielle Rae Bryant

    In Love’s Garden, Nandini Bhattacharya weaves a lush and beautiful and complicated landscape, a “not-good-enough love.” The prose is lyrical and smart. The lens, critical and human.

  6. Haley Allensworth — Reviewer, NetGalley

    This book delved deep into the hearts of mothers and motherless children with war and unrest in India from 1898 to 1950 as it’s backdrop. I enjoyed the book and learned some of India’s history that I did not know. The writing style did make for a dense, sometimes slow read but it was worth it.

    Thank you to Aubade Publishing and NetGalley for access to this ARC.

  7. Irene Malik — Reviewer, NetGalley

    This is such a lovely read, because even as you take a few tentative steps into Love’s Garden, you’re drawn into the world of the enigmatic women who inhabit its pages. There are men too, but it’s the women whose lives are intriguing, fascinating—with all that is spoken and unspoken, hinted at, imagined. . . . Nandini Bhattacharya’s novel is layered, continuously surprising the reader in a way that I found very rewarding. It’s not often that one feels sad when one finishes reading a book, but along with a deep sense of satisfaction, I also felt sad as I left Love’s Garden. A part of it will linger on though, it’s that kind of a book. . . .

  8. Debra Strasser — Bookseller, NetGalley

    Love’s Garden reads like a beautiful fairy tale. The characters are engaging and there is a surprise around every turn.

  9. Meena Kumari, Reviewer, NetGalley

    Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an early review copy. The book was based on and looked into the hearts of mothers along with motherless children with war and upheaval from 1898 to 1950 being the years it was set against. It gave me an insight into this period and I also learned a bit about India’s history that I was unaware of. The style of writing made for a slow read but I enjoyed the book.

  10. Patricia A. Murphy, Reviewer (Educator), NetGalley

    How to find love and keep it is at the heart of this complex, richly drawn historical novel. So little has been written about India during World War II that it is a relief to come to a story that reveals not only the complexities of India, British rule, and partition, but also the precarious lives of the individuals who lived through it. It is also the story of women—British, Indian, upper and lower classes—and their children lost and found. Mother India in all her tragic glory is revealed here through Bhattacharya’s writing.

    This novel is important if only because it documents the tumultuous times in India before and after WWII and partition and how women confronted this period with varying degrees of success and happiness. Since women’s stories are generally left out of histories of war and political turmoil, it is wonderful to discover women who are aristocrats, servants, mothers, lovers, and sisters. The novel brings us to the universal desire to find love and keep it and how difficult this is within the cultural constraints of the patriarchy as it is expressed in India.

    Highly recommended read.

  11. Ethel Fagin — Reviewer, NetGalley

    I requested and received this book this morning and proceeded to read it. Now, I have read many a book about India; albeit historical fiction, but nonetheless I have enjoyed them. Not so with this book. I knew after 5 chapters that this wouldn’t be for me. Didn’t care for the writing . . . not what I expected.

  12. Hannelore Cheney — Reviewer, NetGalley

    Thank you NetGalley and Aubade Publishing for the eARC.
    I love books set in India as I lived there for a couple of years, but this story did not grab me at all. Pity, I was so looking forward to reading it, but had to give up after several chapters. Sorry!

  13. Chesney Chadwick — Reviewer, NetGalley

    I really wanted to love this. The storyline was all over the place. I had a hard time connecting with the characters. It felt very jumbled and it needed to picked apart and put back together.

  14. Barbara L — Reviewer, NetGalley

    I had this book for quite a long time before I bumped it up the ‘to be read’ pile and tackled it. I think I was put off by the cover. Beautiful young woman looking out over lush green tea plantations. I was expecting something pretty soppy. There’s a real trend for ‘romance among the tea bushes’ these days and I’m not a fan. They say we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but I’d SERIOUSLY recommend that the publishers consider changing this one as the book inside is NOTHING like the cover suggests. [The cover has since been changed.]

    This is one of the most miserable books I’ve read in a long, long time. Whenever there’s a possibility that something good might happen, something bad will take its place. Nobody ever seems to be entirely happy. Women make bad mistakes, lose the people they thought they loved with a degree of carelessness that beggars belief, marry completely the wrong men in search (mostly successfully) of money and stability. Not surprisingly, they don’t love their husbands. Even when there seems to be a tiny drop of hope that Prem could possibly find happiness late in life, she doesn’t even notice what she’s lost. I found it hard to believe that a top hostess on the Calcutta social scene had never crossed paths with a famous film director, one that her son knew really well. Lost opportunity, or just another example of the author always taking the path of greatest misery?

    The book perhaps suffers from too many characters. I didn’t feel that I really got to ‘know’ any of them well enough. The use of present tense throughout doesn’t seem to help that either. There was a hint of undeveloped lesbian tendencies early on that went nowhere, as did quite a few of the sub-plots. I assume the POW from Burma ran off with the love interest of another character near the end but by that stage, I was starting to flag and I’m not sure whether it mattered or not.

    This book had a much greater depth and breadth than I expected. I wasn’t as aware of the post-Partition killings in Calcutta and Bengal as I had been of the troubles in other parts of the country though I shouldn’t have been surprised. I do think that the publisher’s spiel over-eggs the ‘British’ elements as these women are not tormented by the rules imposed by British rule so much as by their own rush to find unsuitable husbands and cover up past mistakes. We are told that the British banned the practice of Sati (widow burning) and changed the laws so that widows could remarry and yet, reading the blurb, you’d be forgiven for thinking Prem and her relatives were horribly oppressed rather than living very comfortably indeed thanks to war contracts with their colonial ‘masters’.

    If I could give a half star, this one would be 3.5 stars for me.

  15. Firdaus Gandavia — Reviewer, NetGalley

    Thank you NetGalley and Aubade Publishing for sending me a copy of this book to review.

    The book is one of unending gloom and unhappiness. None of the characters whether male or female seem to be happy and, finally, when the novel ends on a more positive note one feels that the ending is a bit forced, an attempt to give it a relatively happy finale. The author takes all the effort of bringing Jagat Pandey—the love interest (possibly one of the few in the novel) of Prem when she is a school girl and he, her teacher—all the way to Calcutta where Prem now lives; Pandey is now a famous film director. She also makes Prem’s son, Harish, a great friend of the film director; yet Prem and Jagat never meet.

    Most of the women in the novel have arranged marriages, made on the basis of relative status and wealth of the husbands. Hence, it is not unimaginable that their marriages would be unhappy. However, it is a fallacy to assume that all arranged marriages are doomed to disaster. Prem’s mother, Saroj, with whom the novel starts, is a widow who, in keeping with the new laws promulgated by the British prohibiting sati—the barbaric custom where a wife had to be cremated along with her husband—marries a second time. Her husband, Manohar Mishra is kind and tries his best to please her and to cater to her every whim and fancy, yet she is cold and withdrawn. It is true that she has lost her first husband whom she loved dearly and has suffered other losses as well which become clearly towards the end of the novel but her reaction to and her treatment of this kind and loving husband is very extreme and difficult to imagine. One should remember that widow remarriages were not looked on very kindly and very few men would make the effort of doing this.

    Her daughter, Prem, is the central protagonist of the novel. In spite of the neglect and the callous and unfeeling treatment doled out to her by her mother, she is kind and loving. Though, once again, she may not be particularly fond of her husband, she selflessly and tirelessly devotes herself to “her” children. She lives up to her name Prem which means ‘love’ and desperately tries to hold her family together in the face of much opposition. Of the three children she brings up, one is Roderick, the son of her husband and his mistress, an English woman; the second is Roma, the daughter of her childhood friend, Kanan, who dies in childbirth and to whom she had sworn eternal friendship; only the third, Harish, is her son from her marriage to Sir Naren Mitter. In spite this, she loves her children equally. When she has to part from Roderick she is totally distraught and when he reappears the reader realises that the love and the affection she had showered on him when he was growing up is thoroughly reciprocated. In Prem, the author has created one of the most fully developed and credible characters of the novel.

    Prem’s bête noir is Roma. She is moody, difficult and is determined to thwart Prem’s love at every stage. She goes out of her way to disregard Prem’s affection for her and causes her great pain by her obstinate and sullen behaviour, which is quite unwarranted. At one point, Roma seems to be very attracted to the Indian independence movement, nothing really happens of it. In the end when Roma makes peace with Prem, the process seems to be rather rushed.

    One occasionally feels the author was trying to manage a canvass which was too large for her to do adequate justice to all the elements. She seems to pay lip service to the Partition and the riots. Most often, she describes a situation in great detail and “tells” us what the characters are thinking rather than reveal it by way of an incident. Hence, there is a bit too much of narration. What the author does rather skillfully is to create suspense by describing a situation, but withholding the reason for the same till a later date. We see how badly Saroj treats her husband and her daughter early in the novel; the reasons for her unstable state of mind are only revealed towards the end.

  16. Erica Goodwin — Reviewer, NetGalley

    A gripping historical novel set in India in the first half of the twentieth century, Love’s Garden is about a young mother’s deal with the devil that sets in motion extraordinary sacrifices, atonements, and twists of fate in three generations of “mothers,” during a time when women struggled to have a say in their lives and that of their children. The novel astutely examines what women will do to protect those they love, and how they survive after devastating loss.

  17. Judith Moffitt — Reviewer, NetGalley

    There are books that you gallop though as fast as you can read them. And there are books that you savor. Love’s Garden is a book to savor with the rich language and the vivid pictures painted of India during the British colonization and the fight for Indian Independence. The women of the book face challenges in a society where their choices are limited. This isn’t the story of a great romantic love. Rather it is the story of survival in a world where almost nothing is within their control. Their husbands are not evil; it’s not as simple as that. In a world of arranged marriages, not all of them are successful. For my money, that makes the story more interesting than the ones where romance is glorified.

    And the feeling of being trapped in your life is not exclusive to arranged marriages or British colonialism. This a story that will speak to readers from many different cultural backgrounds.

    Nandini Bhattacharya has done a wonderful job of writing a nuanced book that will resonate in your heart. If you only buy one book this month, buy this one.

  18. Sandra Richardson — Reviewer, NetGalley

    Set in India at the turn of the 20th Century, as this particular genre is one of my favourites I was looking forward to reading this.

    The book is very jumbled, but when persevered becomes quite an interesting read.

  19. Anika Gupta — Reviewer, NetGalley

    “This is not a tragic melodrama movie,” one of the characters in Love’s Garden thinks, about her life. Perhaps unfortunately, the same cannot be said of this novel.

    Over the course of many, many lush and searing pages, Nandini Bhattacharya paints a picture of one family’s transition from their quiet lives in an Indian village to pariahs in a ravaged post-independence Calcutta. The story revolves around Prem, a village girl who marries a wealthy Bengali Indian and follows him to the city. There, in Calcutta, Indian independence sweeps like a typhoon through her life; upending her future just like it does the nation’s. This contrast between Prem’s domestic loves and the nation’s epic struggle form the fulcrum of the story.

    Bhattacharya has an undeniable talent as a writer, using words in an inventive but intuitive way, such as when she describes a young girl hugging a friend, “her little body still fluttering with long, perforated sighs.” The imagery of perforation lives beautifully inside the more cliché home of the ragged gasp. Or later, when she describes a necklace: “a fine gold chain blistered by diamonds,” turning the stones’ legendary clarity into small, foretelling bruises. Diamonds, in fact, make many appearances in this novel: as the currency by which women measure men’s love, as when one man fastens a diamond necklace around the “soft, plump throat of the girl-woman he loves,” before eventually breaking the news that he won’t marry her because she’s a Muslim prostitute and he’s a high-society Hindu. Every diamond in this story is some kind of blood diamond, offered to offset or distract from an injury.

    I know from personal experience just how much Indian women value their jewelry—not just because gems are beautiful, but because, as Marilyn Monroe sleekly informed us on a very different continent in a very different time, “men grow cold” but diamonds “don’t lose their shape.” In a time when married women could not own property, jewels formed a woman’s only inheritance; the only wealth and security she could pass on to her own daughters. Appropriately, Prem’s diamonds are almost a billable character, whether offering a moment of sly humor: “the diamond earrings that she wears twinkle as if trying to lighten the situation,” or marking an unbridgeable human divide: “her hand with its heavy diamond ring lies between them on the seat of the Rolls”, or illuminating her as the ultimate society hostess, when “diamonds glitter in” her hair. They symbolize Prem’s burdens, her losses, and the very gilded nature of her cage.

    Into Prem’s gilded cage—her sacred and domestic sphere—Indian independence extends its snaky and insistent fingers. As the movement gains traction, she finds herself torn between the Britishers she’s been taught to revere (and who have enriched and knighted her Indian husband) and her growing awareness that the occupation is wrong. She doesn’t take to the streets; she tries to protect her family.

    Let’s be clear—this book does not excuse empire; in fact, it paints Britain’s injustice in a light that is both accurate and utterly unyielding, as when describing the Raj’s pernicious efficacy at pitting Indians against each other: “For decades, maybe centuries, they [the British] played the gadfly, the ambassadors of hate. Set this Hindu Raja at that Muslim Nawab.” The story spends several pages on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, perhaps one of the most notorious events of the British occupation, in which a British officer ordered soldiers to murder hundreds of unarmed protesters in a locked garden: “Women tried to save themselves by jumping into wells with their children. They couldn’t. Death’s angel in the form of a zealous English officer picked off each soul thrashing toward life.”

    The story climaxes with Partition, which is the division of India and Pakistan; a sort of perverted parting gift from India’s erstwhile overlords. Divided against themselves, Indians turned on each other in a series of bloody massacres that claimed thousands—possibly millions—of lives. The horrors of Partition are depicted in gory detail by one of the characters, who finds herself stranded on the streets as mobs take over the city. Everywhere, she sees body parts:

    “It’s a hand. Possibly a woman’s. Chopped off at the wrist, fingers cactused, clawing inward as if something has been ripped out of them. The stench is much stronger. She sees dark, reddish splashes pulsating with black flies. Dark smears on the pillar . . . A child’s head . . . A woman—young, longhaired—staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. Her breasts are gone.”

    These harrowing chapters are Bhattacharya’s best work: atmospheric, revolting, visceral, necessary. And later, Bhattacharya highlights a part of Partition’s history sometimes overlooked: mobs kidnapped, mutilated and gang-raped women, so frequently that a special law was later passed to attempt to repatriate some of the survivors. From this point onwards, the novel has a near meteoric velocity.

    Prior to the climax, though, it dawdles along. Many chapters pass without noticeable advancement of plot or character. Prem, for all her gestures towards familial solidarity, seems inexplicably ineffective at times, spending long hours moping about and medicating a series of woes that are both enormous and ignored.

    It’s a bit of a spoiler to say it, but this is one of those stories where none of the happy coincidences happen. Everyone arrives too late or dies too early; people go into their graves with words left unsaid. Really, really bad stuff happens over and over again.

    And that’s my real, singular complaint against this novel: it’s too uniformly depressing. Yes, colonialism and patriarchy sucked, but I feel like I’ve read so many novels that seem weighted down by these twin burdens, as if the author doesn’t want to risk us—the modern reader—forgetting how bad it was, or perhaps not realizing how bad it was. And I understand that desire—part of the goal of retelling difficult histories is to challenge us not to turn away from them. But at the same time, I don’t think it would have been untrue to the characters, in this setting, to allow them to feel a few more moments of joy, if only to light up the rest of the darkness.

  20. Maria Martignetti — Reviewer (Librarian), NetGalley

    I read this ARC for an honest review
    All thoughts and opinions are mine

    Set in India—the history of which I have long found intriguing. This covers the time before and after WWII—a time I am not so familiar with but feel that I should.

    Giving the perspective of women, whose voices are rarely heard and certainly not in this culture, I found this offering wonderfully written. Poignant and fascinating in turn

    Highly recommend this read.

  21. Courtney Tonokawa — Reviewer, NetGalley

    Colonial India can be a hard setting to depict in a way that does it justice, but Nandina Bhattacharya does so for the most part, although as one might expect, it’s hardly a pleasant read. Granted, the cover is very misleading, playing into a very romanticized image of the period that could deceive readers.

    I enjoyed the historical breadth of the book, getting a real sense of the dark times the Indian people lived through, from life under the British Raj to the impact of the two world wars. It does feel at times like the story was an endless cycle of misery, with not even a glimmer of hope for anyone, but I do understand that that’s the point.

    I did also find the cast of characters a bit too large and confusing, making it hard to really become invested in each of them personally, even if their broader stories were compelling. I feel, given it is a family saga, it could have benefited from some sort of character guide to help keep track of everyone.

    Despite some of these minor issues, I did mostly enjoy the book, even if I did not expect it to go in the direction it did. I think, if you’re looking for an honest, unflinching look at colonialism and the British Raj from an Indian author’s perspective, then this is a book worth picking up.

  22. Kay McLeer — Reviewer, NetGalley

    I really enjoyed reading this book, the characters were great and I really enjoyed going on this journey.

  23. Jenn Siegrist — Reviewer, NetGalley

    I struggled to get into the book because of the third person writing style. Because of this, it was difficult to understand and follow the characters. The story has some good ideas, but it’s just disappointing about the writing.

  24. Philipa Coughlan — Reviewer, NetGalley

    This is definitely a sweeping family saga with some superb descriptions of India from the days of the Raj through both World Wars and the growing fight for independence from Britain.

    It did however for me take some time to get going. The early chapters set out the tragic sacrifice which a young widow makes in losing her son but often there is stodgy narrative and little dialogue. However as the First World War begins and we have seen how Prem has settled to her marriage and the loss of brave poet Jagat (my favourite character outside the main female mothers and daughters) the novel really begins to start to develop well.

    This is an extremely wide ranging look at India through its rituals and the people within its history seeking to separate and create their own lives beyond the British rule. It also shines a light into the traditional and often brutal treatment of women (see the practise of suttee where as the scriptures would write a young widow must throw herself to burn on the pyre or she’d go to hell for eternity).

    Also interesting was the development of the early Indian film industry (bioscope) a part of Indian culture around these times that I had not heard of before. There was also references to events in which riots that I had not heard of made me want to look further into the often dreadful oppression of the British upon the Indian population. Tragically also is described the way the Indian men were encouraged to fight ‘for the commonwealth’ in both wars and often their roles forgotten or deliberately erased from history.

    Lots to learn and enjoy in this big read.

  25. Heather B — Librarian (Reviewer), NetGalley

    This was a story that just didn’t jell for me. I found it hard to identify with. The title and description beguiled me, the execution didn’t.

  26. Patricia+A.+Murphy

    Skin, that fragile covering over muscle and bone, is at the center of this historical novel
    set in India during two world wars and the division of India or the Partition. More than religion,
    more than politics, it is skin and the color of skin that determines the fates of all the exquisitely
    drawn portraits of each character.
    Whiteness is, of course, is the desired and the most valued of all skin colors. Beauty is
    determined by whiteness. Marriages are arranged according to the whiteness of one’s skin, but
    whiteness, by itself, is not enough. The white skin of a British woman is superior to the white
    skin of an Indian woman even though that British woman is an unmarried mother. Her son’s
    white skin means that father who is besotted by the British, favors this son over the darker skin
    of the son conceived with his Indian wife. An adopted daughter wants to be a movie actress,
    but her dark skin makes this an impossible and foolish dream. She also wants to marry the
    white-skinned Roderick.
    Writing skin color is no easy matter but Bhattacharya handles it easily. For example,
    when the two adopted children are speculating on going to England. Roderick is very aware of
    his skin privilege and uses it against Roma, the dark-skinned adoptee who says, “I’m just
    thinking we could get married.” And Roderick’s response is: “In England they’ll call you darkie,
    you know that, right?” When he thinks about the possibility of marrying Roma: “He’s not sure if
    he can marry a girl with skin as dark as hers and face sort of flat and broad, but you’ve got to
    give it, the girl’s a good sport (p. 98).”
    But the business of skin color reaches far beyond individuals caught up in social turmoil.
    Bhattacharya brings us into the emergence of the nation of India. One of the characters
    remarks: “Maybe the white magic is all gone. Maybe it doesn’t work anymore. The British
    overall are no longer the all-powerful sorcerers they’d once been to Indians.” White
    magic determined the fate of an entire nation and the resistance to British rule is the rejection of
    whiteness.
    Love’s Garden comes at a time when the deep roots of white supremacy have been
    revealed through the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of
    George Floyd. Protests marches erupted all over the world after his death. Love’s Garden
    exposes the global nature of white supremacy and how it functioned in British India during
    two world wars and the Partition. Unfortunately, white skin is still the most prized, in India
    today, and elsewhere.
    Is “white magic” losing its grip on the world? The Republic Party understands this very
    well and is doing everything it can to deny the vote to all the non-white people in the United
    States. On the other hand, the Democratic Party overcame voter disenfranchisement in
    2020 and elected a white man as president and, for the first time, an Asian and African
    American woman as vice president. The Cabinet looks like America—Latinx, African American,
    Asian, white, and Native American.
    This is not to suggest that the struggle is over. The pressures of COVID-19, the
    climate crisis, and the resulting global migrations are equivalent to chaos, terror, and killings
    experienced in India during two World Wars and the division of the country.
    Love’s Garden is a historical novel that reminds us why art of all kinds is essential in
    these times of crisis. It provides a record of how individuals handle cataclysmic change.
    So, when Roderick leaves for England, Roma “wouldn’t leave her room, go to school, or eat .”
    It is 1942 and even though India is at war, Lady Mitter still throws her annual ball. This
    character has evolved from the frightened village girl to prosperous Calcutta lady.
    I don’t mean to suggest that this novel is only about skin color or politics. Reading this
    novel gave me the same sensation I had one lazy afternoon while walking with a friend from
    India. Even though I was in the Midwest in the United States, I could feel the breezes of a
    tropical land far away. I wanted to put flowers in my hair and inhale the fragrance of India in
    all its glory and tragedy.

  27. Raymond Tarpley

    This sophisticated and nuanced portrait of India in the last days of the British Raj expertly explores through richly-developed characters the intersects of wealth and power framed by gender and class inequities as societal values and norms shift at a dizzying pace with colonial collapse. Excellently crafted and researched, Love’s Garden presents an illuminating study of human struggle in the midst of an epic historical transformation.

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