Love the Dark Days

by Ira Mathur

A Guardian biography of the year 2022
Non-Fiction winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023

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 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 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.

"Reads like a fictional family saga as it leaps back and forth in time against a backdrop of patriarchal hegemony and a collapsing empire" - Guardian Best Biographies of 2022

"Compelling" The Observer

"A gem of a memoir... Monique Roffey is spot on when she calls it a blaze of a book" The Bookseller

• ISBN13: 9781845235352
• Publish Date: 7 July 2022
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Peepal Tree Press Ltd
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 222
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Love The Dark Days is a memoir and partly fictionalized autobiography by Ira Mathur. Released 1st Sept. 2022 by Peepal Tree Press, it's 232 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. 

This is a lyrically written and compellingly melancholy memoir chronicling generational trauma through the matrilineal line of the author's family. The product of a privileged multicultural Indian family, she and her siblings are split up and handed off alternately to servants, school, and grandmother at the convenience (and whims) of her distant mother. 

The story itself is so sad that it makes for difficult reading in places. The story is also disjointed and occasionally told and fits and starts. It was the beautiful prose that caused me to make the effort to return and finish the read.

Four stars. Recommended for fans of dynastic sagas. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.