This image is the cover for the book Difficult Daughters

Difficult Daughters

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.

Winner of the 1999 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book (Eurasia Region) and shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in India.

Manju Kapur

Manju Kapur taught English literature at Miranda House College at Delhi University for over twenty-five years. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters, was published in 1998 and won the Commonwealth Prize for best first novel, Eurasia region. Her second novel, A Married Woman, was published in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Encore Award; her third, Home, was nominated for the Hutch Crossword Book Award in 2006; and her fourth, The Immigrant (2008), was a finalist for the India Plaza Golden Quill Award and the DSC Prize of South Asian Literature. Her fifth novel, Custody (2011), has been optioned by Balaji Telefilms. Her work has been translated into numerous languages including German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, Marathi, and Hindi. She lives in New Delhi.

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