Shauna Singh Baldwin. (2015). What the Body Remembers. Knopf Canada.

Shauna Singh Baldwin. 2015. What the Body Remembers. Knopf Canada.

Shauna Singh Baldwin, What the Body Remembers. Knopf Canada, 2015.

Shauna Singh Baldwin. What the Body Remembers. Knopf Canada, 2015.

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1. • value: family
2. • value: Friendship
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16. • value: Historical Fiction
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18. • value: Women's Fiction
19. • value: Modern
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24. • value: literature
25. • value: Alternate History
26. • value: fiction books
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28. • value: Buddhism
29. • value: realistic fiction
30. • value: historical novels
31. • value: historical fiction novels
32. • value: gifts for women
33. • value: historical fiction books
34. • value: gifts for her
35. • value: books historical fiction
36. • value: realistic fiction books
37. • value: women gifts
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Baldwin, Shauna Singh
   • bioText: Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal and grew up in India. The author of English Lessons and Other Stories and coauthor of A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America, her short stories have won numerous prestigious literary awards in the US, Canada and India. The story that was to become What the Body Remembers was awarded the Saturday Night/CBC Literary Prize. The novel, her first, is being published simultaneously in the US, UK and Canada. She presently lives in Milwaukee.
   • name: Shauna Singh Baldwin

imprint

Vintage Canada

publishDate

2015-06-30T00:00:00-04:00

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title

What the Body Remembers

fullDescription

Introducing an eloquent, sensual new Canadian voice that rings out in a first novel that is exquisitely rich and stunningly original.
Roop is a sixteen-year-old village girl in the Punjab region of undivided India in 1937 whose family is respectable but poor — her father is deep in debt and her mother is dead. Innocent and lovely, yet afraid she may not marry well, she is elated when she learns she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner, Sardarji, whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him any children. Roop trusts that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister, but their relationship becomes far more ominous and complicated than expected.
Roop's tale draws the reader immediately into her world, making the exotic familiar and the family's story startlingly universal, but What the Body Remembers is also very much Satya's story. She is mortified and angry when Sardarji takes Roop for a wife, a woman whose low status Satya takes as an affront to her position, and she adopts desperate measures to maintain her place in society and in her husband's heart. Yet it is also Sardarji's story, as the India he knows and understands — the temples, cities, villages and countryside, all so vividly evoked — begins to change. The escalating tensions in his personal life reflect those between Hindu and Muslim that lead to the cleaving of India and trap the Sikhs in a horrifying middle ground.
Deeply imbued with the languages, customs and layered history of colonial India, What the Body Remembers is an absolute triumph of storytelling. Never before has a novel of love and partition been told from the point of view of the Sikh minority, never before through Sikh women's eyes. This is a novel to read, treasure and admire that, like its two compelling heroines, resists all efforts to be put aside.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
   • content: "A stunning first novel.... Intensely atmospheric -- an artistic triumph."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Winnipeg Free Press
   • content: "[She] displays the gifts of a first-rate social observer [and] passionately records the longings, losses and compromises of her characters' lives."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Times (UK)
   • content: "The characters shimmer with life, their predicaments grab the reader by the throat, their fate has the reader on the edge of the seat--. An enthralling read [that] offers a glimpse of humanity that is both intimate and universal."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The National Post
   • content: "An impressive debut."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Readers Showcase
   • content: "...a shining new novel--What the Body Remembers heralds the arrival not only of a significant new talent, but also of a fresh perspective on history, rarely experienced before."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "Shines--an ambitious debut."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Sandra Gulland
   • content: "Wonderful! Wonderful! I just finished What the Body Remembers -- what an amazing novel! I
     feel it has expanded my understanding of the world vastly. And as a writer, I feel nourished, replenished. I drink your words!"
8. • premium: False
   • source: National Post, Dec. 30/2000
   • content: "An epic of heartbreak and honour set in Northwest India in the dying light of the Raj.... Painstakingly researched, its characters frankly convincing, and set against a rich backdrop of gods, politics and tradition, this novel earned its Montreal-born author the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2000 for Best Book in Canada and the Caribbean."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Penelope Fitzgerald
   • content: "I very much admired the strength and control with which the author keeps her complex story going, and at the same time keeps it clear, and true to the spirit of India."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Globe and Mail
    • content: "Engaging."
11. • premium: False
    • source: India Today
    • content: "Baldwin describes the scenes of the Independence movement with great verve. For the subcontinent, Partition was the most momentous event of the 20th century. But men who were affected by it...have written most of the literature. This is a woman's perspective. And because women suffered most when their homes were uprooted, this book becomes a more intimate account."
12. • premium: False
    • source: India Today, September 1999
    • content: "While What the Body Remembers will be read as a story of familial relations, it will be remembered more as social history -- the customs, traditions and mores of rural Punjab, many still unchanged."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Quill & Quire
    • content: "an impressive first novel, hype or no hype. Baldwin's passion for re-membering her dis-membered homeland, and her desire to tell women's version, propel the last half of the novel and make it particularly potent."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus
    • content: "A richly textured often poetic story ... Newcomer Baldwin's theme -- the grueling uses to which women's bodies and spirits are put, and their abuses at the hands of men -- combines with the political analogue of India's struggle for independence to produce a lush, sensuous drama."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Edmonton Journal
    • content: "What the Body Remembers is an engaging story of life in pre-partition India, and a compassionate look at the lives of its two protagonists -- Sikh women who are practically voiceless within their own culture...History is merely a background to the domestic story, but its intimacy is what makes this novel work...What the Body Remembers is a worthwhile read."
16. • premium: False
    • source: The Readers Showcase.
    • content: "...a shining new novel...What the Body Remembers heralds the arrival not only of a significant new talent, but also of a fresh perspective on history, rarely experienced before."
17. • premium: False
    • source: Monday Magazine
    • content: "...Baldwin both overwhelms and educates as she takes readers on this crowded and eventful ride through the complexities of life in 20th century India."
18. • premium: False
    • source: The Times (UK)
    • content: "Shimmers with life...An enthralling read."
19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from October 4, 1999
      The dramatic and brutal story behind the 1947 partition of India, as played out in the region of Punjab, is the compelling backdrop for this stunning first novel that entwines the fate of three remarkable characters: Sardarji, a wealthy Sikh landowner whose heart is in India, but whose head is in England; Satya, his constantly scheming, feisty wife who lives for her husband but cannot give him children; and Roop, Sardarji's second, much younger wife, married for the express purpose of providing the family with an heir. Intensely atmospheric, the novel contains lyrical descriptions of daily life in a village with dusty fields of maize and clusters of homes; the cinnamon, anise and fennel smell of Satya's kitchen; Sardarji's Oxfordian attire and his spindly-legged English furniture. Baldwin, who grew up in India, skillfully creates an exotic milieu where women are sheltered from the outside world and struggle for influence over their families. As headstrong Satya, more involved in her husband's affairs than most of her peers, and demure Roop, trained to exercise traditional feminine wiles, battle for Sardarji's favor and the children Roop soon produces, Sardarji is increasingly distracted by the furor over independence and the future of the Indian state. Baldwin achieves an artistic triumph on two levels, capturing the churning political and religious history of modern India and Pakistan as she explores memorable transformations: of Satya, from a dominating force in her family to a lonely outsider; of Sardarji, from an idealistic, ambitious engineer to a hardened, more realistic civil servant; and finally, of Roop, from an arrogant, self-centered daughter to a selfless wife and mother who becomes the backbone of her family. 6-city author tour; simultaneous publication in the U.K. and Canada; rights sold in Germany, Italy, France.

popularity

73

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shortDescription

Introducing an eloquent, sensual new Canadian voice that rings out in a first novel that is exquisitely rich and stunningly original.
Roop is a sixteen-year-old village girl in the Punjab region of undivided India in 1937 whose family is respectable but poor — her father is deep in debt and her mother is dead. Innocent and lovely, yet afraid she may not marry well, she is elated when she learns she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner, Sardarji, whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him any children. Roop trusts that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister, but their relationship becomes far more ominous and complicated than expected.
Roop's tale draws the reader immediately into her world, making the exotic familiar and the family's story startlingly universal, but What the Body Remembers is also very much Satya's story. She is mortified and angry when Sardarji takes Roop for a wife, a woman whose low status Satya takes as an...

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2. • code: FIC044000
   • description: Fiction / Contemporary Women
3. • code: FIC051000
   • description: Fiction / Cultural Heritage