Set in India, England, Trinidad and St Lucia, Love the Dark Days follows the story of a girl, Poppet, born of mixed Hindu-Muslim parentage in post-independence India. When she lives with her grandmother, member of an elite Muslim family, whose history is one of having colluded with the brutality of the British rule in India, Poppet unconsciously imbibes her grandmother's prejudices of class and race. As the darker child in her family, this makes her feel that she does not belong, leading to an over-anxiety to please the adults around her. That feeling of unbelonging is repeated when her family migrates to multicultural Trinidad, made up of people from many continents, where she encounters Indian people, several generations away from India, who have a very different sense of themselves, who appear critical of what they perceive as her airs and graces...
Raw, unflinching, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days is an intricate tapestry telling of the end of empire that has Poppet's story at its heart.
