Love the Dark Days

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