"Her narrative, refreshingly, is free of anachronism, and she has a pleasing way of engaging the reader's senses....Of a piece with the recent works of Vikram Seth, and reminiscent at times of García Márquez-altogether a pleasure."
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Kirkus (starred review)
"What Viswanathan does remarkably well is give the reader a closeup of India's history, culture, politics and landscape through the domestic lens of one family. This is a rich, sensual book that uses life itself as its plot....Reading it is an experience of immersion. You feel as though you are right there in all the teeming detail of life as Sivakami and her family know it. There is a whole world here between two covers."
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National Post
"With its rich and complex background and often sharp insights,
The Toss of a Lemon is a valuable and evocative work."
-Elaine Kalman Nave, author of
Robert Weaver: Godfather of Canadian Literature (Ottawa Citizen)
"Astonishing. Brilliant. Beautiful....Like the very best novels, at its core,
The Toss of A Lemon teaches us about ourselves."
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January Magazine
"Lovers of Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth will want to get a hold of this Brahmin family saga involving early marriage, early widowhood and clashing values."
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The Vancouver Sun
"
The Toss of a Lemon is a captivating novel that in relating the story of one Indian woman and her family tells the story of a changing society. Precisely and deftly written, constantly interesting, morally serious yet sympathetic-I challenge any reader to start reading this book and give up on it.
The Toss of a Lemon joins the company of great novels on India."
-Yann Martel
"
The Toss of a Lemon is a glorious feat, as boisterously written as it is wholly engrossing. It's about love - and cruelty - and how each reverberate across the generations in one family. And it is that rare thing, a novel that manages to be both epic and intimate at the same time."
-Peter Orner, author of
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo "In this, her debut novel, Padma Viswanathan performs a wondrous balancing act of words. She sustains a vivid sense of the moment while spanning decades, brings unforgettable individual characters to life while recounting a saga of generations, and lays bare the inner worlds of those characters while evoking an entire nation in turmoil. Rich with sensual detail,
The Toss of a Lemon is the story of a community centred on tradition during an era of upheaval and change. Above all, it is a moving and deftly drawn portrait of a family."
-Alissa York, Giller-nominated author of
Effigy
"
The Toss of a Lemon gives readers the rare opportunity to enter the life of a Brahmin widow, to live her norms and routines and rituals as they have been lived by countless women over thousands of years. Padma Viswanathan's remarkable achievement is to capture the slow, stately pace of an 8,000-year-old culture and yet keep her story moving briskly. I closed the book indebted for this immersion in a world I could not have otherwise entered."
-Shyam Selvadurai, author of
Funny Boy
"Viswanathan . . . achieves something that is in many way more nuanced than the broad brushstrokes of an epic: a meditation on fate's workings in a family dominated by the quiet rule of one woman."
The Washington Post Book World Sivakami was married at ten, widowed at eighteen, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her headis shaved and she puts on widow's whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children.
Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchamibecomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together throughthe turbulent first half of the twentieth century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too;Sivakami's son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld.Heartbreaking, exhilarating, and profoundly exotic,
The Toss of a Lemon is above allan evocationof the tensions that change brings to every family."Padma Viswanathan has real talent."
New York Times Book Review "[An] exquisite debut novel. . . . [E]lectrifying."
Baltimore Sun Padma Viswanathan is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist. Her writing awards include residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Banff Playwright's Colony, and first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. Shelives withthe poet and translator Geoffrey Brock and their children in Fayetteville, Arkansas."