Words At Large

The connections between India and Canada continue to lead to more great fiction about the subcontinent being published in this country. With her debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon (Vintage Canada), Padma Viswanathan joins a distinguished line-up of Canadian authors writing stories set in India.

Recently, CBC Radio’s Studio One Book Club welcomed Viswanathan to Vancouver to talk about her novel and the family stories that started it all.

Viswanathan's own family history inspired this novel, which is a stunning depiction of the very private life of a Brahmin family over the course of sixty turbulent years in India.

Sivakami is only 10 when she is married to an astrologer and village healer, who is drawn to her despite a horoscope that predicts his early death if they wed. Widowed by by the time she is 18, the resourceful Sivakami follows strict caste rules and lives a sequestered life with almost no contact with the outside world.

Only once does she break tradition, insisting on a secular education for her son, Vairum. As he grows up, their very different attitudes toward caste identity amidst the country’s rapid political and social changes set the two of them on a collision course.

Viswanathan is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist from Edmonton. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona, and currently lives with her husband and children in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

The Toss of a Lemon is one of two novels published this spring in Knopf’s annual New Face of Fiction program. This series has a great track record, including best-selling novels by Ann-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel and Ami McKay in past years.

For this public interview, CBC host Sheryl MacKay was joined by co-host Jen Sookfong Lee, the Vancouver author of The End of East (Vintage Canada) and one of Knopf’s New Face of Fiction authors in 2007.