The East Indian
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Meet Tony: the first Indian to set foot on American soil.
Among the settlers, slaves, and indentured servants that make the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 1600s — for some, an exciting opportunity, for others, a brutal abduction — there is also Tony. As a child, his homeland on the Coromandel Coast of India becomes a trading outpost for the English; as an orphaned teenager, he finds himself kidnapped from the streets of London and sold into servitude on a Virginia plantation. But Tony is not giving up on his dreams just yet.
Under the rule of a sadistic plantation owner, he forms a tender bond with a young boy who will haunt his nightmares; on an exploration inland alongside a trader and Native Americans, he realises the world is vaster and more mysterious than he could have imagined; and in Jamestown, he finally earns himself a position as a physician’s apprentice, an ambition he has long harboured.
The East Indian is a Dickensian-style yarn about family, friendship, and finding oneself in the seeds of a new world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shakespeare scholar Charry marks her U.S. fiction debut with a marvelous picaresque of a boy's journey from 17th-century India to colonial Virginia. Tony, the narrator, lives on India's east coast with his courtesan mother and her patron, Francis Day. After Tony's mother dies when he is 11, Day arranges for him to travel to England as a servant. After his new employer dies on the voyage, Tony finds work in London as a dockworker and shelter in a boardinghouse run by a compassionate Bengali man. Watching a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Tony is fascinated by the "Indian boy" over whom Oberon and Titania compete, wondering if the nameless character is valued "as a child, as a servant, or simply as a rare thing?" Tony lives in England for eight months before being abducted and illegally shipped to the colonies to supply Virginia tobacco growers with labor. He reaches Jamestown in 1635, where he's indentured for seven years to a wealthy landowner, then transferred to an even crueler master, but he manages to survive due to his bonds with fellow workers, both Black and white. Richly imagined characters and keen explorations of identity, place, and the power of imagination drive this luminous achievement. Readers of Esi Edugyan and Yaa Gyasi will be enthralled.
