Set against the tumult of the 1947 Partition, Manju Kapur's acclaimed first novel captures a life torn between family, desire, and love. The one thing I had wanted was not to be like my mother. Virmati is the eldest of eleven children, born to a respectable family in Amritsar. Her world is shaken when she falls in love with a married man. Charismatic Harish is a respected professor and her family's tenant. Virmati takes up with Harish and finds herself living alongside his first wife. Set in Amritsar and Lahore and narrated by Virmati and her daughter, Ida, a divorcée on a quest to understand and connect with her departed mother, Difficult Daughters is a stunning tale of motherhood, love, and finding one's identity in a nation struggling to discover its own.
"Intensely imagined, fluidly written, moving. Through our struggles with our parents, it flings us into their own momentous times, their youthful yearnings for love and independence and life."
Vikram Chandra
"This is a skillful, enticing first novel... sensuous... offers a completely imagined, aromatic, complex world, a rare thing in first novels."
