James Dunk

But it's just such a beautiful evocation of ecology as a way of thinking and approaching and standing in the world.

It has these beautiful essays about

thinking like a mountain about how a mountain might respond to the death of wolves or the extinction of wolf species and how it might anticipate the problems that might cause.

Yeah, I mean, it's really been interesting to see how my son is responding to these, you know, it's difficult language, but such wonderful ideas and world-changing ideas laden in these short essays.

Yeah, and I mean, it reads like really fresh thinking, actually.

I mean, it's been picked up and used and driven a lot of different kind of movements.

I mean, deep ecology takes a lot from him.

But yeah, it's wonderfully fresh.

So the novel sets out kind of in the sickbed of the grandmother, Sushila, and

It kind of is a moment where she's quite sick and Sandhya has been called from Melbourne in Australia, as well as members of the family being called in to kind of pay their respects and be with Sushila as she departs this life.

And so the kind of novel unfolds around that and around the kind of the backstory.

We learn more of those original events in the 1930s that have given great shape to the family's experience over those years.

Sushila's family, the Sastris, were Indian, South Indian people, Tamils of a Brahmin caste.

They were some of the many Indians who were brought into Burma to work in the British system, basically.

They were

Middle-class administrators, Sushila's father was the postmaster, postmaster Sastri.

And, you know, in the 1930s, there were huge numbers of Indians were brought across to work in Rangoon and other cities in Burma.

And it led to, produced a great amount of tension between the indigenous Burmese and the Indian population.

That's right.

And that's really kind of the central, really the emotional movement of the book is about these two women, their kind of different awareness, their level of awareness about where they fit in the society around them.