A Handbook For My Lover

Book excerpt:

‘I wish I had never met you. You’ve been nothing but an inconvenience.’

Part kitchen-sink realism and part rumination on the nature of love, A Handbook For My Lover is a revealing and explicit memoir of a young Indian woman’s erotic affair with a photographer thirty years her senior.

With prose that is charged with intensity and sensuality, this candid exploration of love, lust and becoming heralds a provocative new talent in contemporary Indian literature – one of an independent woman unafraid of her sexuality. Rosalyn D’Mello is India’s Anais Nin.

The modern Indian woman’s journey into self-awareness through sex, heartache, desire and fulfilment has found a brave new voice in Rosalyn D’Mello.

The Hindustan Times

D’Mello lays down her only law – excess. She wants every pleasure of the flesh and she won’t apologise for it.

Elle India

About the Author

Rosalyn D’Mello is a widely published freelance art writer based in New Delhi and was the editor-in-chief of Blouin Artinfo India. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Open, Mint Lounge, Art Review and Art Review Asia. Nominated for Forbes’ Best Emerging Art Writer Award in 2014, she was also shortlisted for the inaugural Prudential Eye Art Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art in 2014. She was associate editor of The Art Critic, a selection of the art writings of Richard Bartholomew from the 1950s to the early 1980s and was a member of the jury of the Prudential Eye Art Award 2015. A Handbook For My Lover is her first book.