Read an exclusive excerpt from Notes on Marriage by Selma Carvalho (Published by Speaking Tiger, 2024)
Sunday Dinner
Dear Mother,
I dreamt of Eugenia, last night. I wonder about the things I dream of sometimes. The guilt of them, the shame of them, the paralysis where I am unable to save myself. But then, there is a tiny sense of self-preservation even in dreams which emerges, which forces me to endure the darkness and look to the world with hope. Father inserts himself everywhere—in my dreams, in my waking hours, as mirror, as oracle, as cautionary tale, as the genesis of me. All things stem from father—the confusion that lies at the heart of my life. I need to embrace the complexity of my inner self.
I am not one thing or the other. I am many things in one. I’ll see you for dinner on Sunday.
Love, Anju.
The Horton Hall manor house rises like a rock, a binding of the woods, a flag, an understanding between man and nature that henceforth nature would always lose. In spring, a pale green light pours through its sash windows and in winter it greys with gale-force winds; the house itself becomes the seasons, a loamy life form of dank breath. The house is three hundred years old. How many lives has the house held over the centuries? It has two large halls at the frontend, a skeletal stairway leading upstairs where across the hallway span six bedrooms. But five steps down, there is a whole backend: a kitchen, a pantry, and a servants’ hall; this part feels more worn, its timber beams having breathed deeper and longer, grieved an older grief of damp and famine and war, a grief which shadows the new. It is not a large house, smaller than a good-sized country estate. Like everything else in father’s life, it’s an allusion to greatness. This storied space demarcates the feudal power-share of the lives it governs. Anju’s family have lived here for as long as she can remember, although it was Grandfather Frank Burton’s house, inherited by her mother, Jeanne Burton. Her father, Nivant Kale, says often that Frank’s OBE for service to the community was an abomination, a relic of empire which should have been done away with a long time ago, but he is not so constricted by principle as to refuse the large inheritance Grandfather Frank left the family. Besides, he could never afford a house such as this on what the Horton Gazette used to pay him. Father lined the vaulted walls of the house with dead writers and poets—Trotsky, Mulk Raj Anand, Romain Rolland, a joyless consortium of Marxists, and George Orwell, before the Conservatives claimed Orwell as their own.
Excerpted with permission from author Selma Carvalho and Speaking Tiger Books the publishers of Notes on a Marriage (2024)
About the Book
In his younger days, Alfred Hughes had been quite the Nineties revolutionary at his university in England, clad in faded army fatigues and smoking Cuban cigars. They called him Ché Freddo. His comrades in arms were Nido—Nitin—son of divorced Indian immigrants, and Eugenia—ardent admirer of Sylvia Plath, who believed that one had to sacrifice everything for a cause, be fearless in death. Into this mix came Anju Kale, of British Asian heritage, the only child of a disheartened Indian Marxist father and a submissive, but wealthy, English mother, and her entry into this tightly knit group caused all equations to shift and change.
As time goes by, Freddo gives up revolution for the security of a college professorship, Nido for a job at Goldman Sachs. Anju marries Freddo and tries to come to terms with his serial philandering, in a marriage precariously held together by middleclass sensibilities. And the devastating secret about what happened to Eugenia.
Until Anju too finds herself caught in an extramarital relationship. Trapped between the need for fulfilment and a love of stability, Anju must redefine what it means to be a family. In prose that is lyrical and beguiling, Selma Carvalho weaves a story about a marriage that is tender, startling and wise in turn.
This masterful work from the author of the remarkable fiction debut, Sisterhood of Swans, confirms Carvalho’s place in the literary firmament.
About the Author
Selma Carvalho is a British Asian writer. Her novel Sisterhood of Swans was shortlisted for the SheThePeople Women Writers Prize 2021 and listed as a Notable Book of 2021 by Asian Review of Books. Her short fiction has been widely published by UK presses, including Kingston University Press. A collection of her short stories was a finalist for the SI Leeds Literary Prize and is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger.
