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Published Feb 2023
432 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A young bride must leave her life in India behind when she moves to Nepal with her new husband and his family in this incandescent, poignant debut novel which examines the sorrow and deep sense of loss experienced when we abandon our former selves and our dreams.
"Is this a ghost story?" Meena asked the barber's wife who told the tale. "I don't want to hear scary stories one night before I marry."
"Not all ghost stories are scary," said the barber's wife, laughing at Meena. "Besides, we have a long time before us, and stories are little baskets to carry time away in."
Exquisitely written, a blend of ghost stories, myths, and song, The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a haunting, deeply felt multi-generational story that illuminates the transitional nature of women's lives and the feeling of loss they experience, as they give up one home and family to become part of another.
When she marries a man from Nepal, Meena must leave behind her family and home in India and forge a new identity in a strange place. The Woman Who Climbed Trees follows her, the women who surround her, and the daughter she eventually raises, as they carefully navigate the uncertain tides of their diasporic lives. Smriti Ravindra beautifully captures these women's pain and nostalgia for the past—of a country left behind, of innocence lost, of a former self, of dreams forsaken.
"Most women live diasporic lives. The very fact that societal structures expect women to leave their biological homes and enter the homes and identities of their husbands mean that homesickness and nostalgia for a life once lived, or dreams once held close, are realities for most women," Ravindra explains. "This was true for my mother too. All her life, living in Kathmandu, she longed for India. Given the cultural, geographical and religious proximity of Nepal and India, her yearning sometimes seemed ridiculous, and it took me time to understand that the longing was not only for a country left behind, but for another time and other possibilities."
"Ravindra debuts with a stunning chronicle of an Indian woman's coming-of-age...This is electrifying." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Through a mix of ghost stories, myths, and songs, Ravindra examines the way that women are expected to reshape their lives for men and the pain that comes with leaving everything behind." - Harper's Bazaar
"The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a lyrical, furious triumph of a novel, mapping the marital journey of its protagonist, Meena, from girlhood to motherhood, from India to Nepal, from prosaic reality to magical madness. In the tradition of Salman Rushdie and Isabelle Allende, Smriti Ravindra braids epic lore and myth to a narrative of claustrophobic domesticity, earthly damage, and incandescent love." - Maria Dahvana Headley, New York Times-bestselling author of Beowulf: A New Translation and The Mere Wife
This information about The Woman Who Climbed Trees was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Smriti Ravindra holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. As a Fulbright scholar, she studied women's oral storytelling in the Terai region of her native Nepal. Her fiction and journalism have been published in the US and in India. The Woman Who Climbed Trees is her first novel. She currently resides in Mumbai.
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