The Inheritance (2024)
It’s 1986 and 29-year-old Marlo O’Sullivan of London-Irish stock has just found out that his sister is his mother. To steady his life, he moves to Glengarriff, to a cottage he has inherited, in the stunning Beara Peninsula. When a neighbour dies unexpectedly, Marlo takes over his minibus service to Cork. There is nothing regular about the regulars on the bus – especially Sully, a non-verbal 6 year old, who goes nowhere but does the journey back and forth every day, on his own. Marlo is landed with this a strange but compassionate arrangement, fashioned to give the child’s mother respite from his care. Sully’s obsession with an imaginary friend in the ancient oak forests of Glengarriff slowly unveils its terrible secrets – a 400-hundred-year-old tragedy reveals itself.
The Tainted (2020)
It’s spring 1920 in the small military town of Nandagiri in southeast India. Colonel Aylmer, commander of the Royal Irish Kildare Rangers, is in charge. A distance away, decently hidden from view, lies the native part of Nandagiri with its heaving bazaar, reeking streets, and brothels. Everyone in Nandagiri knows their place and the part they were born to play-with one exception. The local Anglo-Indians, tainted by their mixed blood, belong nowhere. When news of the Black and Tans’ atrocities back in Ireland reaches the troops, even their priest cannot cool the men’s hot-headed rage. Politics vie with passion as Private Michael Flaherty pays court to Rose, Mrs. Aylmer’s Anglo-Indian maid, but mutiny brings heroism and heartbreak in equal measure. Only the arrival of Colonel Aylmer’s grandson Richard, some 60 years later, will set off the reckoning, when those who were parted will be reunited, and those who were lost will be found again.
“Cauvery Madhavan’s evocative narrative spins together the intriguing lives of her characters over nearly seven decades and makes ‘The Tainted’ a riveting read. Unfolding largely through conversations among the principal characters is an elegiac tale of the Anglo-Indian community, their heritage and their uncertain future. The intricate details of every experience are captured in simple language and with great precision. A moving story, compellingly told”
— SHASHI THAROOR, INDIAN POLITICIAN AND WRITER
“I was immensely moved by this epic novel. A compelling and assured novel of conflicting loyalties and conjoined pasts that resurrects forgotten histories of the Irish in India, exhuming tragic loves and foiled mutinies, and examining them in the clear light of the present.”
— NAMITA GOKHALE, FESTIVAL DIRECTOR, JAIPUR LITERARY FESTIVAL
The Uncoupling (2002)
A traditional couple from southern India, Balu and Janaki Shankar are in their late fifties and have been married for 26 years in reasonable harmony. They go to visit their son, their first trip to Great Britain, but he is unable to take time off from work to spend with them and instead sends them on a 16-day bus tour across Europe. During a two-night stop in Amsterdam at the beginning of their trip, Balu experiences something that leads to a sexual reawakening for him-a newly discovered sexual appetite for his wife-which just may be the beginning of the end
Paddy Indian (2001)
Padhman, a young newly qualified Indian doctor,from Madras arrives in a Dublin hopsital to do his,Fellowship. As the only son of a wealthy medical,family, he cannot come to terms with being treated,like just another foreign doctor. In recreating,his lifestyle from back home, he falls in love,with two women at the same time, Annie and Aoife., His mother in Madras is horrified. Anne is Anglo,Indian and as for the Irish girl with the,unpronounceable name… While all of this is going,on, Padhamam’s Irish friends accepts he is ‘great,craic, just like one of us.’