Golden Earrings – Belinda Alexandra
A powerful saga of family, love, honour and betrayal
You who judge me: come! Let me tell you a story …
Paloma Batton is the granddaughter of Spanish refugees who fled Barcelona after the Civil War. A disciplined student with the School of the Paris Opera Ballet, Paloma lets little get in the way of her career until she receives a visit from an otherworldly being who leaves her with a pair of golden earrings.
Sensing that she has been given a quest, Paloma begins exploring her own Spanish heritage and makes the connection between the visitor and ‘la Rusa’, a woman who rose from poverty to become one of the great flamenco dancers of modern times.
La Rusa died while living in Paris in 1952. Her death was ruled a suicide but as Paloma begins to unravel the secrets of the past, she discovers more than one person who had good reason for wanting la Rusa dead, including Paloma’s own grandmother.
GOLDEN EARRINGS is a story that moves between two great cities: Barcelona in the lead up to the Civil War and Paris in the 1970s. It is the story of two women and the extremes to which they are willing to go for love. It is a story of great passions — and great betrayals — where nothing is quite as it seems.
Set during a monsoon season in the 1980s in a small town in Pakistan, Season of the Rainbirds is centred on the mysterious reappearance of a sack of letters lost in a train crash nineteen years previously. Could the letters have any bearing on Judge Anwar’s murder? The letters and the judge’s death trigger a series of tragic events and as the murder investigation progresses, dark tales of passion and betrayal unfold and long-buried secrets come to light.
Ayyan Mani, one of the thousands of dalit (untouchable caste) men trapped in Mumbai’s slums, works in the Institute of Theory and Research as the lowly assistant to the director, a brilliant self-assured astronomer. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots, one involving his knowledge of an illicit romance between his married boss and the institute’s first female researcher, and another concerning his young son and his soap-opera-addicted wife. Ayyan quickly finds his deceptions growing intertwined, even as the Brahmin scientists wage war over the question of aliens in outer space. In his debut novel, Manu Joseph expertly picks apart the dynamics of this complex world, offering humorous takes on proselytizing nuns and chronicling the vanquished director serving as guru to his former colleagues. This is at once a moving portrait of love and its strange workings and a hilarious portrayal of men’s runaway egos and ambitions. .
Nothing in Lakshmi’s childhood, running carefree and barefoot on the sun-baked earth amid the coconut and mango trees of Ceylon, could have prepared her for what life was to bring her. At fourteen, she finds herself traded in marriage to a stranger across the ocean in the fascinating land of Malaysia.
Welcome to the infamous Pingkang Li—home of the celebrated Lotus Palace courtesans, and a place of beauty and treachery…
Memories and Such 