Cranes' morning

the long version

Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen's first novel, Daughters of the House, was a "wondrous accomplishment," in Amy Tan's words, marking a literary debut of "a major discovery in literature." The Baltimore Sun hailed her subtle tale of four women in rural India as "penetrating and beautifully written." Now, in her new novel, Aikath-Gyaltsen deepens her vision of village life in India, delving intimately into the yearnings of the human heart and the secret inner struggle between tradition and desire. Eccentric, intellectual, born to easy manners and with a taste for aesthetic pleasures, the Kushari family of the lost valley town of Mohurpukur lives on faded memories and suppressed emotions. All that remains of their wealth is the shell of the Big House, a shabbily splendid mansion overwhelmed by an unkempt rose garden; all that remains of their aristocratic heritage is an inbred sense of duty toward the townspeople. Kunal, the last male of the Kushari line and now the principal of the local college, creeps through life with the conviction of failure. Generous to a fault, Kunal is at once pampered and controlled by the women who surround him: his wife Gargi, possessed of the grace of an artist and the temper of a tigress; his smiling old aunt Vidya, keeper of all secrets of the past; his three willful daughters . Into these lives of muted desperation, a stranger arrives like a blast of damp, gritty wind. Vikran Sen, a playwright of some reputation, has just been released from a Calcutta prison. His appearance galvanizes the hermetic world of Mohurpukur, stirring up long buried emotions, revealing painful secrets, forging new alliances. Glowing with the dusty exotica of the Indian countryside - japoncia flowers and kookaburra birds - Cranes' Morning takes us deep inside a world as fascinating as it is strange. Delicately nuanced, brilliantly observed, by turns wryly comic and disturbingly sad, Cranes' Morning is an exquisite literary gem.