Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel

✍ Scribed by Malladi, Amulya

• Book ID: 109150244
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 489 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780307416704

✦ Synopsis

From Booklist

Malladi's fourth novel transports readers on a cinematic journey through late-twentieth-century India as seen through the eyes of the inhabitants of Tella Meda, a religious community on the Bay of Bengal. Kokila comes to the ashram in 1961 as an 11-year-old orphan. She later renounces her arranged marriage to stay within Tella Meda's restrictive walls, a move she comes to regret. The ashram's guru attracts a cast of misfits from near and far--widows, abused wives and their neglected children, the daughter of a prostitute, a father guilty over his daughter's suicide--each illuminated by Malladi in her kaleidoscopic perusal of both the ills of India's caste system and the repercussions of rigid moral dicta. Running historical updates on India's wars, elections, and assassinations introduce each chapter. But the crux of the novel is how Malladi's female characters struggle with the stifling effects of caste and gradually respond to the movement for women's rights that surges as the century draws to a close. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“A sprawling, gorgeous intergenerational saga, in which the spice and savor of traditional India progresses painfully into the present–the changing of women’s lives and the dimunition of the man as household god. Told through the mysterious embroidery of one family’s tapestry–its life, loves, regrets, secrets, deaths, and even what comes after death–Song of the Cuckoo Bird is mesmerizing.”
–Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and The Breakdown Lane

From the Trade Paperback edition.