Birds of Wood: A Novel

Rebecca Mathai

AGAINST THE UPHEAVALS OF MODERN DELHI, THREE SISTERS CONFRONT THE COST OF BELONGING, OBEDIENCE AND AMBITION.

In 1970s Delhi, a Malayali Syrian Christian family bids to make a life in a city that is itself being remade.

Joey, crippled by arthritis, clings to parochial ideals of the ancestral village he left behind. His wife, Ammal, suffocates under the weight of a household hinging on obedience and appearances. Meanwhile, their three daughters grow up between the deep fault lines of punitive traditions.

Outside, Delhi convulses. The Emergency has given way to an uncharted political time, the aftermath of the 1984 massacres lingers, and a new upwardly mobile bourgeoisie imagines a future from the ashes of a rapidly changing country.

What begins as an ordinary family’s attempt to preserve its place gradually becomes a reckoning with inheritance of illness, silence and shame. Spanning the austerity of 1970s Delhi to the new millennium, Mathai’s evocative debut is an intimate and unsparing novel about a family learning to keep up with their expectations and limitations.

For readers of multigenerational family sagas, literary fiction about India and stories of sisters, mothers and the secrets families keep.