Books by Sara Banerji

Above them the great rock bulged out like a too clever forehead, too clever for anything to grow upon, too smooth for anyone to climb… It might be the only place on earth which is so high and difficult to get to, that people can''t reach it.When Sangita the Ranee of Bidwar is caught up in a scandal, her husband banishes her from the palace and forbids access to their young son, Anwar. She lives miserably as a disgraced woman, praying to Ganesh for Anwar to be taken from her husband, so that he would know her suffering. Then, Anwar goes missing. In a hill-tribe far above the palace, on land impenetrable to man, the young males are dying. When they come across a Coarseone – a child from civilisation below - they use him to create a new life: their new Maw, their king.Two generations later Sangita''s granddaughter, Devi, heads to the family''s derelict hill palace to research the mountain''s minerals, with instructions to look out for the apocryphal Ama stone. At the same time, a tree-felling company finally reach the mountain top where they discover the hill- tribe. Maw, now a young man, is injured trying to stop the lumberjacks driving them off the land. He is brought to Devi, who takes him down to the palace where the family care for and educate him, but he always has a look in his eyes that no one understands. Will his tribe think their king has deserted them, or do they suspect he is playing a longer game... a life-long game to avenge his tribe their suffering?Tikkipala is a hypnotic tale of love and preservation at a time of fading empires. Meticulously and soulfully written, Banerji takes the heart on a journey through mystical cultures and spiritual practices, to a world where anything is possible if love is strong enough.

When Hermione - eccentric, seventy and returned from India to a 'safe' life in the Home Counties - encounters Slug street-painting on the pavement, she employs him as assistant gardener. Slug, who has the motto ' Never Grow Old' tattooed across his head, will soon sort out Gerald, the pin-striped head gardener, soften his ruthless marshalling of her plants and introduce a more effusive atmosphere to her estate.But when Hugh, Hermione's huge husband, dies, Slug's skinhead cronies begin to threaten her peace, and Hermione retreats to the chaos of India, chasing the memories of her previous life. What happened to the young Indian with whom she fell passionately in love when she was nineteen, and who had insisted that she marry the more ' suitable' Hugh? Can she recreate the dream of over fifty years ago?Writing on Skin is blackly comic in its humour and sweeping in its imaginative scope.

Today is Julia Clockhouse's twenty-fifth birthday. Her long-suffering Hindu servants are frantically trying to organise a party for her, but it's hard to do so amid the havoc wreaked by her wild spirit. They think she is possessed. Daughters of colonial tea-planters shouldn't have souls that escape their bodies, move objects with their minds, hear tongueless yogis speak. Julia Clockhouse does.As the day passes and the chaos mounts in the kitchen, Julia listens desperately for the return of her husband. Ben may have married her on the orders of her domineering father, but he had come to love her; together they had found the happiness they missed in childhood. But by the time the party guests are tumbling in from the rising fury of the monsoon Ben has still not come.Sara Banerji narrates the events of an extraordinary birthday with deft humour and haunting eloquence, weaving into Julia's story a picture of an isolated tea-plantation and all those who live there. The Tea-Planter's Daughter is a captivating flight of the imagination firmly rooted in the reality of the South Indian hills.

In a once great, now falling, mansion live an aristocratic family: Alice, huge, sad and longing for love; her paralysed mother who is subject to wild and eccentric enthusiasms; and the foster child Agnes, whose desire to be an actress sets in motion a train of bizarre and horrifying events.Then love comes to Alice in the form of beautiful but furtive Vincent who has moved in next door. But does he want Alice for herself or for the treasures that she digs from the rubble of her tumbled home? And how does he view Alice's obsession with compost, the making of which she compares to the growth of spiri­tuality and the purging away of sin?Black comedy lurks beneath the surface of this gloriously imaginative new novel from the author of Cobweb Walking, The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel and The Tea-Planter's Daughter.

The Mandel family is rich, powerful and superstitious. Twenty years ago things were very different when they arrived in Calcutta, starving and penniless, intent on making their fortune. Now, Papa Mandel, ruthless architect of the Mandel success story, is dead but his spirit lives on in his unwitting daughter Jayanthi.Jayanthi is an avid reader of romantic magazines, and the plans for her marriage -a marriage of convenience which will further extend the Mandel influence -seem depressingly loveless to her; the more so as the wedding day approaches and increasingly bloody events surround the Mandel clan as they jostle for power.Observing the gathering pandemonium and providing a bemused commentary on events is Police Deputy Babu, a sycophant by nature, whose attempts to gain promotion are continually thwarted, and whose efforts to keep in with the Mandels are largely self-defeating.The violence and scheming and confusion come to a head on the day of Jayanthis wedding - but no one, not even the spirit of Papa Mandel, has predicted the extraordinary course the day is to take.The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel is an original and powerful work. The authentic feel of India is caught - its extremes, its mysticism, its beauty, the voices of its people. And underlying the drama is a detached and ironic humour which both illuminates and enriches this remarkable novel.

First published in 1991, Absolute Hush is set during the Second World War when the human race stands at the crossroads: self-destruction or a glorious evolutionary step to higher consciousness.In the grand and moated Plague House, served since the start of the war only by the spiteful charlady, Mrs Lovage, live beautiful Elizabeth and her thirteen-year-old twins -plump pyromaniac George and Sissy, always struggling with her mother for her brother's love. Into this strange household comes Lump - otherwise known as Hush - intent on saving the world. But initial confidence wavers as stress, conflict, fire and death are encountered in an inspired and memorable finale.From the author of Cobweb Walking, The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel, The Tea-Planter's Daughter and Shining Agnes comes a wonderfully mythic and vibrant novel of the imagination.

As a child-so tiny and delicate that her father calls her fairy-Morgan has a special relationship with nature, for she can hear the Silence, the harmonising force that creates and sustains all things. The hum­ming of the Silence is her secret, even from her beloved father, as is the day that she walks along a cobweb.But with adolescence comes a loss of childhood innocence and the intrusion into her perfect world of an unwanted step­mother and baby sister. These loud and chaotic presences, together with an act, as she perceives it, of unwarranted violence by her father, have a traumatic effect on Morgan. Sent by her father to get help-for the family has been trapped in a fall-out shelter for days-Morgan, a dwarf, goes instead on an odyssey into the unknown, seemingly hostile, world outside her home.Mourning the disappearance of magic from her life and realising for the first time that she is physically deformed, Morgan learns that only through love can she regain her empathy with the Silence and the ability to transcend the boundaries that enclose other people.In this, her first novel published in 1986, Sara Banerji has created a work of startling originality and beauty. Full of vivid images, Cobweb Walking is a perceptive story about shattered childhood dreams and the painful awakening to self-awareness.