praise

Kirkus Reviews

Atmospheric, multigenerational novel that explores class lines, love, and death in modern India.

Jones’ novel opens with the recovery of a sunken statue off the Bombay coast in 1640. Representing Stella Maris, the Virgin Mary as celestial queen, it stands at the center of a small Catholic community, a legacy of the Portuguese. Jones moves swiftly into the modern era, beginning in the late 1970s with a distracted historian emeritus, Francis Almeida, now sagging into an unfulfilling retirement, lost in his archives while missing his children and grandchildren, who are scattered around the globe. Well into the narrative, as Jones carefully rounds out her characters, Almeida runs his bicycle into an 8-year-old girl, Celia D’Mello. Celia suffers a broken arm, but that’s less painful than the loss of one of the two shoes she has. Swept under the wing of the distracted professor and his loving wife, Celia becomes a familiar in the comfortable Almeida home, a sharp contrast to that of her impoverished but aspirational family. Time passes, and with it come changes: Celia grows up, marries, and suffers a string of calamities, one foreshadowed at the very start of the book. Meanwhile, Almeida suffers, a bit more each day, from dementia, vaguely recalling at first that Celia “was the village child who had once pitched into his bicycle—­he could never remember the girl’s name,” eventually forgetting the names of his family. Jones writes with extraordinary empathy for her characters and their unhappy fates, peppering her prose with sharply observed aphorisms: “This was what the world did: press in on you with its bad-news this and so-sad that, snatch away what little time you had to see to your own affairs, fill your head with pictures you wished you’d never seen.” That’s­ just so, but her characters endure as best they can, and mostly with admirable dignity.

Steeped in tragedy, but beautifully, memorably, and soulfully told.