Bijou Roy
A Novel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Ronica Dhar captures the struggles of family and cultural identity with such tenderness and depth of feeling that she makes these subjects completely her own. Bijou Roy is a thoughtful, elegant novel." —Ann Patchett
Bijou Roy's life in Washington, D.C. is not thrilling but it is steady. When she loses her father to a long illness, she travels to India to scatter his remains in the river that runs through his native city. With the weight of her grief still fresh, she leaves a career and relationship in limbo only to be thrust into unfamiliar territory.
Never having fully understood why her parents severed their ties to India, she is drawn to Naveen, the son of her father's closest comrade. Naveen holds over Bijou intimate details of their fathers' past and their political involvements. Quickly, she is embroiled in the mysteries of love, grief, and family histories, questioning what happens next when the customs of neither an original nor an adopted culture provide comfort.
In her quest for answers, Bijou sees how each generation must wrestle—often at great risk—with the one who came before, and, perhaps above all, comes to learn how to replace sorrow with hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her deft debut, Dhar examines the consequences of secrets shared between families against the politically charged backdrop of modern India. As the eldest of two daughters, U.S.-raised Bijou Roy struggles to fulfill traditional male roles for the burial of her father, Nitish, culminating in a trip with her mother and sister to Calcutta to scatter his ashes. In the unfamiliar country, each step of the process reinforces Bijou's alienation, from the people and culture as well as from her mother, who continues to keep Nitish's past shrouded in secrecy. It's only after meeting Naveen, the son of Nitish's oldest friend, that Bijou begins to comprehend her father's political entanglements and the reasons her parents migrated years before. As she learns more about her father, Bijou predictably gains insight into her own character, but Bijou's struggle to reconcile tradition with the demands of the modern world is propelled by skillful, luminous prose.
