Wonderfully dense and wise, with a narrative sweep recalling the work of Dickens, Love's Garden conveys both characters and ideas with impassioned intelligence. The garden of the title is India, gorgeously portrayed in all its complexity through the personal travails and occasional triumphs of one fragmented family centered on Prem, who struggles to hold her fragile clan together. Bhattacharya's love for her subjects and for India shines through in her lyrical prose, creating a compelling saga of broken people navigating through a broken world, its brokenness illuminated by beauty and heart, and by the courageous human individuals trying to survive. --Laura Catherine Brown, author of Made by Mary
A gripping historical novel set in India in the first half of the twentieth century, Love's Garden is about a young mother's deal with the devil that sets in motion extraordinary sacrifices, atonements, and twists of fate in three generations of "mothers," during a time when women struggled to have a say in their lives and that of their children. The novel astutely examines what women will do to protect those they love, and how they survive after devastating loss. --Sybil Baker, author of While You Were Gone
Love's Garden is a fascinating and well-crafted journey into India's complex past with characters that will entice you, fill you with indignation, and sometimes break your heart. I particularly enjoyed the stories of the women, who are complicated, brave, headstrong, and impetuous--in other words, deeply human. --Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Forest of Enchantments, and Before We Visit the Goddess
From the first chapter of Nandini Bhattacharya's novel, one recognizes the urgent, unflinching voice of an author who lays bare the political and cultural barriers towards choice faced by women in Ango-Indian society as the subcontinent struggles with the weight of imperialism at the turn of the 20th Century. We follow the lives of women, sobered by the limits class, money, and color play as they navigate their world as best they can. --Indira Ganesan, author of The Journey and Inheritance
In Love's Garden, Nandini Bhattacharya weaves a lush and beautiful and complicated landscape, a "not-good-enough love." The prose is lyrical and smart. The lens, critical and human. --Danielle Rae Bryant
