Toss of a Lemon

Toss of a Lemon

Inspired by her family history, Padma Viswanathan takes us deep into the private world of the Brahmin clan, bringing to life an India we've never seen.

At the novel's heart is Sivakmai, married at ten, widowed at eighteen. As her caste requires, her head is shaved and she wears widow's whites, and from dawn to dusk she cannot contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her two small children.

She dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: she returns to her husband's house to raise those children.

Her servant, Muchami, bound by a very different set of caste rules, becomes her public face, and their singular bond holds three generations together through a turbulent half-century of social and political change.

'Viswanathan's book, like Rushdie's work, aims for epic status. But it actually achieves something that is in many ways more nuanced than the broad brushstrokes of an epic: a mediation on fate's workings in a family dominated by the quiet rules of one woman- and the struggle of her son against the strictures of her belief'- Washington Post.

Padma Viswanathan is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist from Edmonton, Alberta. Her writing awards include residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Banff Playwright's Colony, and first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. She received her Creative Writing MA from Johns Hopkins and her MFA from the University of Arizona, and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

'The Toss of a Lemon joins the company of the great novels on India'- Yann Martel.

'Married at 10, in 1896, then motherhood at 14 and four years later a widow's white sari- these are the determining events in the life of a Brahmin girl called Sivakami, the main character in (this) ambitious first novel... Padma Viswanathan has real talent'- The New York Times.

Toss of a Lemon
UWA Publishing
Author: Padma Viswanathan
ISBN: 9781921401305
Price: $34.95