Tag Archives: Renita D’Silva

#BookReview ‘The Spice Maker’s Secret’ by @RenitaDSilva #historical #India

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The Spice Maker’s Secret by Renita D’Silva is a sad, heartbreaking tale of two young women trapped by circumstance, by events beyond their control, different but in some unknown way connected. D’Silva is a magical writer about India, this time the scent, taste and power of spices is dominant. And she always writes intriguing, determined female characters, often difficult but always inspiring. Renita d'SilvaThere are two alternating timelines, of Bindu in 1930s India and Eve in 1980s London; their circumstances so different that a link between the two seems impossible. But both are trapped. Eve is weighed down by grief, struggling to leave the house, to eat, to return to a life that will never feel normal again. Bindu is weighed down by poverty, her small village suffering as drought hardens and everyone scratches a meagre survival. To protect those she loves, she takes a decision that finds her surrounded by obscene wealth, weighed down by elaborate jewellery. Bindu, the beautiful village girl who won a scholarship to college, who helps her grandmother Ajji cook wonderful curry feasts. Bindu who, according to spiteful gossipy villagers, thinks she is better than everyone else. When things get bad, Bindu remembers Wordsworth’s golden daffodils and she cooks.
Bindu’s narrative dominates and although this is good, I found myself wishing for a little more of Eve’s story before the life-changing event that shaped her world in 1980. After a start that wasn’t slow exactly but had me itching for things to develop, The Spice Maker’s Secret takes off at around 30%.
In Bindu’s India in the Thirties, the country is struggling towards independence as the world faces another global war. There are opportunities for women to be independent and Bindu wants to be one of them but instead finds herself in a traditional household; she is not allowed to mix with men, not able to enter the kitchen, forbidden to cook, daily newspapers are removed. Strong-willed, intelligent and brave, Bindu’s marriage starts to falter as she is unable to connect with her equally strong-willed husband Guru. She is expected to produce an heir, a son; but Bindu knows she is carrying a daughter. When full of despair and anger at her situation, she remembers the calm, soothing advice of her grandmother. Sometimes she listens to Ajji’s words, sometimes she doesn’t. So she makes plans to escape the elaborate mansion just as years ago she skived off school, enduring the nuns’ disapproval, to help her frail grandmother cook the catering commissions which helped them survive. But now Ajji is dead and Bindu must face childbirth alone.
D’Silva builds the tension layer by layer, chapter by chapter, passing through phases of happiness then sadness, a little hope and contentment then more sadness and happiness. It is a very emotional book.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE
A MOTHER’S SECRET
BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY
THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING
THE ORPHAN’S GIFT
THE WAR CHILD

If you like this, try:-
‘The Wolf Den’ by Elodie Harper #1WolfDen
‘Restless Dolly Maunder’ by Kate Grenville
‘The Blue Afternoon’ by William Boyd

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET by @RenitaDSilva https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-7Ip via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Verity Bright

#BookReview ‘A Daughter’s Courage’ by @RenitaDSilva #historical #India

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A Daughter’s Courage by Renita D’Silva is the story of four girls, in India and England, separated by a hundred years. D’Silva explores how actions have consequences not only instant but generations later, not just for the person concerned but also for people unknown. What happens to Lucy and Gowri in the 1920s impacts on the contemporary lives of Kavya and Sue, one newly-widowed and feeling adrift, the other a failed Bollywood actress. Renita D'SilvaTwo girls at the beginning of the twentieth century. One rich one poor, a continent apart and in circumstances so remote from each other. Both are trapped by their circumstances. Both are mavericks who want more than their parents plan, dreaming of a life different from the one that society expects.
Gowri is the older daughter of a poor tenant farmer in India in 1924. She loves school and plans to be a teacher. But her only brother is ill and when an amazing opportunity presents itself, her parents choose her brother’s life and in exchange Gowri becomes a devadasi, a woman dedicated for life to a local temple and the goddess Yellamma. Her hopes and dreams are nothing.
In England in 1927, Lucy flirts at parties but longs to travel with her best friend. But when Ann falls in love and marries, Lucy’s dreams are abandoned. Lucy, who ‘doesn’t want to tread the path chalked out for her. She doesn’t want to follow the crowd,’ seeks a different kind of adventure. When things go wrong, Lucy marries a stranger and travels to his coffee plantation in India. With her husband James polite but cold, she obsesses over the mistakes she has made. The lives of Lucy and Gowri change forever when they are brought together as a tiger roams the woodlands.
What a fascinating read this is. A trifle slow to get going, and occasionally repetitive, I soon didn’t want to put it down. I was intrigued more by the daily lives of Gowri and Lucy and their dilemmas, than the contemporary women, but what kept me reading was the puzzle of how all four women are connected. As Kavya discovers previously-hidden letters and Lucy finds startling photographs of India, a news story hits the headlines in India. A long-forgotten temple has been discovered by a rampaging elephant, its history and ownership are in doubt.
A beautiful story of heartbreak and family, set in the fragrant and beautiful landscape of India where abuse and exploitation can be hidden in plain view.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A MOTHER’S SECRET
BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY
THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING
THE ORPHAN’S GIFT
THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET
THE WAR CHILD

If you like this, try:-
‘Devotion’ by Hannah Kent
‘Pigeon Pie’ by Nancy Mitford
‘Things Bright and Beautiful’ by Anbara Salam

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE by @RenitaDSilva https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-6jB via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Joanna Trollope

#BookReview ‘The War Child’ by @RenitaDSilva #WW2 #historical

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Two women, two generations apart. In The War Child, Renita D‘Silva explores the connections between a mother and child, through danger and separation, self-sacrifice, unstoppable events and the pressures of modern life. Renita D‘SilvaD’Silva tells the dual timeline stories of Clara and Indira over many decades, setting the strength and promise of women across four decades against the twentieth century prejudices of chauvinism and racism. In London, 1940, teenager Clara is woken by her mother as their home is bombed. Her mother presses into Clara’s hand a necklace, a St Christopher’s medal, with the promise that it will always protect her. Orphaned, Clara is taken in by her aunt and begins helping at a local hospital treating injured soldiers. When nurses and doctors ignore a wounded Indian soldier because of the colour of his skin, Clara nurses him to health. When the war ends, she decides to fulfil a long-held promise to herself. Inspired by sitting on her father’s knee and listening to his stories of India, Clara takes a job as nurse companion to a delicate boy whose parents are re-locating to India. And there, she falls in love.
In India, 1995, 33-year old Indira is chairing a board meeting when she gets a message to ‘go to the hospital’. Fearing her young son is dying – he is in hospital for a minor surgical procedure – she finds her husband and son both well. The message refers to Indira’s father who has had a heart attack. Indira returns home to her parents, somewhere she hasn’t been much of late as she seeks to avoid their simplistic boring life, resenting their dissatisfaction with her life choices.
Sometimes raw and painful, always emotionally complex with surprising twists that make you gasp, The War Child is another brilliant book by my first-choice author for Indian historical romance. D’Silva is such a visual writer that India is a real place on the page, the colours and scents are both beautiful and challenging, her descriptions as full of contrasts as fresh guava sprinkled with chilli powder.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE
A MOTHER’S SECRET
BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY
THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING
THE ORPHAN’S GIFT
THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET

If you like this, try:-
‘The Tea Planter’s Wife’ by Dinah Jefferies
‘Call of the Curlew’ by Elizabeth Brooks
‘The Sapphire Widow’ by Dinah Jefferies

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE WAR CHILD by @RenitaDSilva https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5mW via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Orphan’s Gift’ by @RenitaDSilva #historical #India

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The Orphan’s Gift by Renita D’Silva tells the stories of two women, Alice and Janaki, and moves across four decades between India and England. It is a deceptive tale of love and loss and the mystery of how these two young women are connected at a time when certain love was forbidden. It is an unforgiving world where broken rules may be punished by death, isolation and poverty and where the sanctions may come from those closest to you. Renita D’SilvaWe first meet Alice, aged four, living a privileged life in the house of her parents, surrounded by beauty, warmth, and servants. But there are shadows too. Alice’s parents are distant and she finds love and companionship with her Ayah and Ayah’s son, Raju. Alice’s mother is delicate and spends all her time in a shadowed bedroom, her father is Deputy Commissioner of the British Government in India. Alice’s story starts in 1909 when the first agitations of Indian independence begin.
Janaki’s story begins in 1944 when she is raised by nuns in an Indian orphanage, she was left there as a tiny baby, wrapped in a hand-made green cardigan. Desperate for love, Janaki learns a difficult lesson; that even when love is found, there is no insurance against future pain.
The lives of both women are coloured by their early years and their differing experiences of love. Each story on its own is fascinating, but the fascination comes from how the two women are linked. Occasionally we see a tantalising glimpse of the elderly Alice in India in 1986, as an unknown visitor arrives. Hints are given in the Prologue which of course I read then forgot about as I became enthralled in the world of the book. Only as the book approaches its end does the significance of the Prologue become clear. D’Silva’s theme is how life turns on a sixpence. ‘It takes so little to change a life.’
I particularly enjoyed Janaki’s life at the orphanage, her friendship with Arthy, the pact the two girls make to study as doctors after meeting Mother Theresa and seeing one of their friends die because of the orphanage’s inability to pay for a doctor. Janaki’s story jumps forwards to the 1960s when she is a trailblazing doctor of gynaecology, at a time when female doctors are rare and given many column inches, but when she feels at her loneliest.
Love, and its subsequent loss, is not always fair; it hurts and can be unjust. This is a story of the ripple of consequences, it is also about the strength and truth of unselfish love which transcends prejudice, poverty and status. This book is full of the colours and scents of India but at its heart is a darkness and sadness which jabs an emotional punch. D’Silva is my go-to author for novels about India; she creates a sensory world which never fails to delight but into this setting she weaves stories tackling moral and heart-breaking themes.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE
A MOTHER’S SECRET
BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY
THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING
THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET
THE WAR CHILD

If you like this, try:-
‘At First Light’ by Vanessa Lafaye
‘The Sapphire Widow’ by Dinah Jeffries
‘Fatal Inheritance’ by Rachel Rhys

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ORPHAN’S GIFT by @RenitaDSilva https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4Fw via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Girl in the Painting’ by @RenitaDSilva #historical #India

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When Renita D’Silva writes about India, it comes alive on the page. Her books are dual timeline family mysteries combining a modern day narrator with historical events set in India. With her latest, The Girl in the Painting, D’Silva tackles guilt, forgiveness and sati – when a husband dies, his widow burns with his body on the funeral pyre. It is her emotionally toughest novel yet and handled with sensitivity and balance. Renita D’SilvaThis is the story of three women – Margaret, Archana and Emma – pre-Great War in England, India in 1918 and England 2000. At the beginning, each woman is introduced in short chapters which made me long to dwell a while with each in turn, rather than jumping around. I was puzzled at how these three women, so different from each other, could be connected. Each has a deep sense of duty that, despite a longing to make her own decisions, is an anchor to a sometimes unwelcome, difficult, reality. Yet being impulsive and taking decisions without consideration for others often has far-reaching consequences. The early 20thcentury was a pivotal time in world history and a period of rapid change in the lives of women. Margaret’s family is separated tragically by war, Archana’s by impulsive love; both separations deeply affect these two young girls and reverberate throughout their whole lives. It is Emma in modern-day England who faces a moral and emotional decision of her own, who travels to India with her daughter to cast light on the story.
The emotional connection really kicked in for me when Margaret and Archana meet at the halfway point in the book. From that point, I didn’t want to put the book down. The parallel struggles in Margaret and Archana’s early lives, even though thousands of miles apart, demonstrate the commonality of being human. Tragedy does not strike the undeserving, the old, the unlikeable, the lazy; it strikes everyone without selection. But D’Silva’s story is not about tragedy; it is about what comes next, about taking a deep breath and moving forward.
There is an evocative portrayal of Archana’s village life, the daily grind of poverty juxtaposed with the fertility of flowers and fruits, exotic colours and birds; and the picture of slum children in Bombay who live beside the railway tracks. Neither is romanticised. I also enjoyed Margaret’s time as an artist and her transition to India, using her art as a promotional tool in the fight for Independence. The story covers a lot of history and there were times when I would have liked to immerse myself in a period, but the characters move onwards.
Given the title, The Girl in the Painting, I assumed the front cover design was of the specific painting. In fact there are a number of portraits in the novel and in my imagination none looks like the cover. So I prefer to think it is a portrait of Margaret in the garden at Charleston, welcomed by the Bloomsbury Group, free to allow her art to flourish, free to

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE
A MOTHER’S SECRET
BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY
THE ORPHAN’S GIFT
THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET
THE WAR CHILD

If you like this, try:-
‘The Sapphire Widow’ by Dinah Jeffries
‘The Photographer’s Wife’ by Suzanne Joinson
‘Somewhere Inside of Happy’ by Anna McPartlin

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING by @RenitaDSilva https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3Tk via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Beneath an Indian Sky’ by @RenitaDSilva #historical #India

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Women’s ambition, women’s capability to lie and manipulate, and women’s ability to love, cherish and recover. Beneath an Indian Sky by Renita D’Silva is the cautionary tale of Sita and Mary and how their lives, from childhood to old age, are entwined in India. It is a symmetrical story, but the permutations of its angles and consequences are not clear until the end. Be patient, relax into the story, because the ending is worth it. Renita D’Silva1925, India. Sita’s parents despair of her acting like a girl so, to encourage more restrained behavior, they arrange for her to become friends with Mary. Mary’s parents encourage individuality, freedom and learning, but Mary secretly envies the rules and ordered life of Sita’s home. And so the two girls become friends. Until in 1926 something happens which splits them apart.
This is a tale of opposites; two little girls who, despite being different, become friends. What happens when they grow up turns into a darker more difficult story about friendship, honesty, betrayal, loss, anguish and regret. Renita D’Silva takes you to another world, India pre- and post-partition, with all its scents, colours, flavours, wealth and poverty. She is a magical writer of the setting into which she lays an emotional story of the twists and turns of women’s treachery and ability to heal.
The girls are born into an India where women must defer to their husbands and sons, where endless wealth and dirt-grovelling poverty exist side-by-side; where women do not always support each other and mistakes are not forgotten. Behind the story is a ‘be careful what you wish for’ moral that applies to both girls. Intertwined with their story is the modern one of Priya, a documentary film-maker, who lives in London and is unable to have a child.
I really enjoyed this book, read quickly over a weekend. Be warned, secrets have a way of being found out.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE
A MOTHER’S SECRET
THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING
THE ORPHAN’S GIFT
THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET
THE WAR CHILD

If you like this, try:-
‘White Chrysanthemum’ by Mary Lynn Bracht
‘The Tea Planter’s Wife’ by Dinah Jeffries
‘A Life Between Us’ by Louise Walters

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY by @RenitaDSilva https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3jl via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘A Mother’s Secret’ by @RenitaDSilva #historical #India

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What a tangled web some families weave. A Mother’s Secret by Renita D’Silva is a fragrant tale of mothers and daughters stretching from England to India. Gaddehalli is a tiny village in Goa but I could smell the spices, hear the wind in the trees, and see the buffalos in the fields as if I was there. Renita D’SilvaThis novel about identity starts with a young girl, Durga, who must stay with her grandmother in Gaddehalli after an accident to her parents. The ruined mansion where she lives, which is avoided by the locals as haunted and full of bad luck, is the centre of this story. The modern-day strand follows Jaya, a young mother in England mourning the loss of her baby son and whose mother Sudha has recently died. Sudha was an emotionally-withdrawn mother, but when Jaya discovers some of her mother’s hidden possessions, including diaries, she pieces together the story of Sudha’s early life. Jaya is looking for the identity of her own father; she finds so much more.
From the beginning, it is a guessing game: how is the story of Durga connected to Kali, Jaya and Sudha? Halfway through, all my ideas of the twist had been proven wrong and I was wondering if the storylines would come together. At times I got the girls confused, but I read the second half of the novel quicker than the first and the twist, when it came, was a big surprise. A clever novel about families and how the important, simple things in life can sometimes be forgotten because of pride, selfishness or shame.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Renita D’Silva:-
A DAUGHTER’S COURAGE
BENEATH AN INDIAN SKY
THE GIRL IN THE PAINTING
THE ORPHAN’S GIFT
THE SPICE MAKER’S SECRET
THE WAR CHILD

If you like this, try:-
‘Yuki Chan in Bronte Country’ by Mick Chapman
‘Crow Blue’ by Adriana Lisboa
‘Love and Eskimo Snow’ by Sarah Holt

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A MOTHER’S SECRET by @RenitaDSilva http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2b0 via @SandraDanby