AustLit

'A woman who can’t swim wades into a suburban pool. An Indian family sits down to an Australian Christmas dinner. A single mother’s offer to coach her son’s soccer team leads to an unexpected encounter. A recent migrant considers taking the fall for a second generation ‘friend’. A wife refuses to let her husband look at her phone. An international student gets off a train at night.

'Roanna Gonsalves’ short stories unearth the aspirations, ambivalence and guilt laced through the lives of 21st century immigrants, steering through clashes of cultures, trials of faith, and squalls of racism. Sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes playful, they cut to the truth of what it means to be a modern outsider.' (Publication summary)

'After a lifetime in India, Philip returns to Australia, to his estranged wife Jenny, whom he had brought from India fifty years earlier. Philip seeks to establish links with his ex-wife and his grandson amidst the 2001 'Tampa' crisis. Displaced and disappointed in his hopes of resuming a career in his own country, Philip is visited by a ghost: Ragini, the young revolutionary he fell in love with in 1948. Philip is troubled by his unsorted memories of those times. In 1948 India has achieved its independence but the princely state of Hyderabad – the Nizam's Dominions – with its feudal splendours and deep pockets of rural poverty and injustice, totters alone, unwilling to accede to India, fighting Communist insurrection within. Philip, 'the world's youngest headmaster', has been appointed from Australia to a one-teacher school in the distant town of Warangal, a post no Hindu will take. He meets Anand, a Congress Party member working to bring Hyderabad into the Indian Union, and Ragini, the daughter of a landlord and a Communist, who has given away the family lands. A love triangle develops as events sweep them up – events that will return to life and take their toll half a century later. "The Last Candles of the Night" is a lyrical and moving tale of the pitfalls of memory and the costs of deep allegiance.' (Publication summary)