Literary Mystique

"It was easy to dwell on the little things when you didn’t think about there being a time when you no longer could.." From The Blurb :  In Mansi Shah’s stunning debut novel, a family tragedy beckons a first-generation immigrant to the city of her birth, where she grapples with her family’s past in search of where she truly belongs. After her parents moved her and her brother to America, Preeti Desai never meant to tear her family apart. All she did was fall in love with a white Christian carnivore instead of a conventional Indian boy. Years later, with her parents not speaking to her and her controversial relationship in tatters, all Preeti has left is her career at a prestigious Los Angeles law firm. But when Preeti receives word of a terrible accident in the city where she was born, she returns to India, where she’ll have to face her estranged parents…and the complicated past they left behind. Surrounded by the sights and sounds of her heritage, Preeti catches a startling g...

"Perhaps we only ever have one true chance at anything and the rest, if offered, is always second best.." Review : Loss is integral to life – from birth, we lose the safety of the womb. Often we lose our position in a family to another sibling. Change is all encompassing. We lose the three-legged races of childhood and later career-driven and consumerist ‘races’ imposed by a success-driven world. When we age, we lose our looks and our health. Ultimately, we die. Always, we are at the mercy of progress, risk and accidents; often we are victims of war. Set in 1920, against the background of Poland’s tragic and tumultuous relationship with Russia, through war, revolution and invasion, until 1954 in the Snowy Mountains of Australia, The Tulip Tree revolves around two brothers - Henryk and Adam and their families faced with the struggle for existence. Brothers Henryk and Adam Radecki’s relationship is fraught with love and jealously. Henryk, unhappily married to Lucia, is a clever...