The House of Hidden Mothers
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Shyama, a forty-eight-year-old London divorcee, already has an unruly teenage daughter, but that doesn't stop her and her younger lover, Toby, from wanting a child together. Their relationship may look like a cliche, but despite the news from her doctor that she no longer has any viable eggs, Shyama's not ready to give up on their dream of having a baby. So they decide to find an Indian surrogate to carry their child, which is how they meet Mala, a young woman trapped in an oppressive marriage in a small Indian town from which she's desperate to escape. But as the pregnancy progresses, they discover that their simple arrangement may be far more complicated than it seems.
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In The House of Hidden Mothers, Meera Syal, an acclaimed British actress and accomplished novelist, takes on the timely but underexplored issue of India's booming surrogacy industry. Western couples pay a young woman to have their child and then fly home with a baby, an easy narrative that ignores the complex emotions involved in carrying a child.
Syal turns this phenomenon into a compelling, thoughtful novel already hailed in the UK as "rumbustious, confrontational and ultimately heartbreaking . . . Turn[s] the standard British-Asian displacement narrative on its head" (The Guardian).
Compulsively readable and with a winning voice, The House of Hidden Mothersdeftly explores subjects of age, class, and the divide between East and West.
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