Persistent Rumours

by Lee Langley

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Novel (Eurasia) and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Best Novel Award.A childhood mystery has haunted James Oakley all his the disappearance and unexplained death of his mother far away in India. Years later, in an attempt to unlock the past, he returns with his unhappy wife Daisy to the islands where he was born, a place of treacherous seas and hurricanes, which conceals an appalling secret.

Genres: Fiction, India

Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Award-winning novelist and travel-writer, Lee Langley was born in Calcutta in the late 1930s, of Scottish parents, and she spent most of her early childhood there. Her parents separated when she was 4, and she spent the next 6 years travelling through India with her mother, where she got caught up in the Indian independence riots. Her family returned to the UK as feelings rose higher against the British. Lee Langley has since written of a sense of loss and exile from a place that she had loved as a child. She won the Writers’ Guild Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Lee Langley has also written film scripts and has adapted novels for TV. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also an active committee member of the P.E.N., the writers’ organization that campaigns for freedom of speech internationally. Lee Langley is married to the novelist Theo Richmond, and lives in Richmond in London.

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book, although the jumping back and forth was confusing at times. Interesting story of man searching for the truth about his mother's death.

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Not the best page-turner, but a really well thought-out book and I appreciated some of the themes about aging and how relationships fall apart. It was very sad though.

[Christiane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read other books by Lee Langley but this – in my opinion – is her masterpiece : complex, realistic characters, a suspenseful and intriguing plot and - as the icing on the cake - brilliantly evocative descriptions of the Andaman Islands.

As is the custom during the British Raj, the child James is sent “Home” to live at a boarding school, while his parents stay on in the Andamans where his military father runs a penal colony for Indian prisoners. Like the other boys, James has to deal the best he can with his homesickness, especially the separation from his beloved mother, and come to terms with the fact that family visits will be very few and far between.

Then, one day, he receives news of his mother’s death, supposedly by drowning, under mysterious, never explained circumstances, a trauma which will shape his entire life and all his relationships …

This book can be enjoyed on many different levels : the development of a psychologically fascinating (if not particularly likeable) main character and several equally fascinating secondary personages … pictures of two marriages … parent-child relations … British colonial society with its hierarchy and protocol carved in stone and no place for those who harbour different ideas or interests … the plight of the harshly treated Indian prisoners, many of whom innocent, or “guilty” of fighting for the freedom of their country against British rule … the displacement and decimation of the aboriginal tribes and the usurpation of their land and the consequent cruelty and brutality on both parts … on a lighter side, the fascinating subject of maps and cartography …

All in all, a totally absorbing, very moving book.