Product Description

When their traditional business - selling saris - is increasingly sidelined by the new fashion for jeans and stitched salwar kameez, the Banwari Lal family must adapt. But instead of branching out, the sons remain apprenticed to the struggling shop and the daughters are confined to the family home. As envy and suspicion grip parents and children alike, the need for escape - whether through illicit love or in the making of pickles or the search for education - becomes ever stronger. Very human and hugely engaging, "Home" is a masterful novel of the acts of kindness, compromise and secrecy that lie at the heart of every family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36448 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
"'A very absorbing novel.' Daily Mail"

Observer, April 29, 2007
'Tender and well-crafted and boasts a wonderful sense of time and
place.'

Woman, May 14, 2007
'Dealing honestly with family strife and drawing characters that
are comfortingly familiar, this is a clever and thought-provoking read.'

Customer Reviews

Home, not so Sweet Home
We learn a lot in this novel about the pressures and rewards (not so many of the latter) of living in a traditional extended but close-knit Indian family of shopkeepers: brothers and their families living in the same house; the submissiveness of women to their mothers-in-law even when these show their resentment of their daughters-in-law; the pressures on wives to produce children - boys for preference - and the disgrace if they fail to do so; the pressure for arranged marriages, and for the eldest daughter to be married before a younger brother; the importance of caste, social ranking, education, skin colour and horoscopes within the marriage market; even young girls having to fast one day a year for their future husbands; the pressure to adopt the children of deceased relatives; the demands of the family shop on all the members of the family and the ethos of unremitting hard work by the men to make the shop prosper; the women, in this novel at any rate, spending the energies left over from cooking and housework in being jealous of each other, and, being particularly status-conscious, in nagging their husbands who, in this novel, are softer than their wives.

The respected, benign and conservative patriarch maintains some kind of unity in the family, but when he dies, the tensions multiply. The patriarch had stood in the way of modernization. The shop had sold nothing but saris. After his death, the second generation modernize the shop, expand into ready-made clothes, and then pull down the old house in which they have been living and build a more modern one - at the cost of, among other things, bribing the local authorities and the police. With great difficulty, the sons push out the nephew who was only a sister's son. The men in the third generation are more ambitious still, now branch out into bridal dresses and all the accoutrements needed for those lavishly described Indian weddings. A new daughter-in-law does not show the traditional submission to the mother-in-law, and keeps herself and her husband separate from the communal living that had been the norm before. In the third generation also a young girl falls `unsuitably' in love and suffers heart-break under the still conservative social restraints of her family.

It is basically a sad book, with none of the characters being really happy and all being caught up in family tensions. Most unhappy of all are the two principal characters - Sona of the second generation and Nisha of the third: Sona because the world around her is changing too fast for her; Nisha because it is not changing fast enough and she is still trapped. We are drawn deeply into this family's story, which is very well told, with what I found a moving ending. The author's style is straightforward, even if it is peppered with many Indian words the English reader will not know; their rough meaning, however, can generally be guessed. Her tone is compassionate rather than censorious, though there is much to be censorious about.

Manju Kapur - HOME, Pure Gold !
I have just finished this novel, and it held me rapt for the week
or so it took me to devour it. It is charmingly written, the characters
come to life, evoking sympathies, empathy and dislike in appropriate measure. You feel as though you are growing and learning and suffering and at the end sharing in the joy of the leading character. I read alot, and quickly, and pretty much always enjoy a good read, but this one stands out for its reality and it's influence on this reader's mood and calmness. When I finished it, a smile was on my face and I let out a contented sigh. Read it for a real mood boost, a marvellous believable and lovely story fabulously told. BRAVO !! Ms Kapur.

Social Dynamics of an Indian Community
This book is hard to put down.

It details the inner workings of a joint family from the Bania (trader) community in Delhi with what can be called mathematical precision. Its very strength lies in the predictability of the characters as they adapt to face the rapid changes which modernity has brought in its wake to the fast paced life in the metropolis that is Delhi. A parallel to this book, is Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy', but the protagonist in this book is less adventurous and more identifiable with the average girl in her community than her counterpart, Lata, in 'A Suitable Boy'. Ultimately, the protagonist experiences that it is her security in her self and her ability to create (her own business), and even procreate, that helps her get over the heady rush of a love affair that had to be sacrificed on the rocks of casteist tradition.

The writing is detailed and very evocative, it is a clear depiction of life in Delhi, and especially Delhi University, the cafes, in Kamla Nagar, the summer heat, the long queues at a homeopathy doctor's clinic. The frustrations experienced by the characters against this backdrop, appear credible and impart their strength to this book. This is a less explored genre of English literature that is coming up rapidly as more and more women from developing countries explore their talents and strengths as they begin tocope with matters beyond mere survival in the world of today. I look forward to her next book.