Daughters of Empire

Book excerpt: A sweeping saga of migration and the challenges it presents one family, this is a story about sisters Ishani, who stays in Trinidad with the family business, and Amira, who migrates with her family to England. Ishani, the older sister full of bluff certainty, is a good-hearted manipulator determined to extend her influence across the seas. Soul-searching Amira, on the other hand, wonders how she will raise three daughters outside the support of her extended family, and whether the values of her traditional Hindu upbringing can provide her children with the means to negotiate the seductions of aggressive British individualism. As a middle-class family able to live in prosperous Mill-Hill, the Vidhurs face little of the hostility experienced by other Caribbean and South Asian migrants, but they too discover that even those with the very best colonial educations may never quite fit in, especially with those who see only color. An examination of education, class, and race, this novel provide a unique look at Caribbean Diaspora.