Andrea Gunraj is a community outreach worker for METRAC (The Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children), which promotes the rights of women and children to live free from violence and the threat of violence. Her parents immigrated from Guyana, a region whose culture and politics have infused Gunraj’s writing. She and her husband live in Toronto.
Andrea Gunraj makes an extremely confident and accomplished debut with her sweeping novel of love, rivalry, family, corruption, magic and friendship. This is the start of a dazzling career.
This incredible story begins in the first minutes following a mother’s discovery that her three-year-old daughter has been abducted. These early pages launch us into the mother’s story. Headstrong, defiant, and troubled, Neela navigates a bitter relationship with her genius brother, Navi, and her grandmother, and eventually escapes her stultifying village with the bad seed of the town to a new resort development in the heart of the Caribbean country’s rainforest. Jaroon soon comes to embody the corruption that festers in this alienating place. When Neela, now the young mother of Jaroon’s child, grows afraid of his unpredictable brutality and leaves him, she sets into motion a terrifying chain of events that changes all those who know them. <TOP>
Book Reviews and Quotes
"The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha announces the arrival of a wonderful storyteller. The dynamics of the relationship between Navi and Neela, a brother and a sister, and how their individual lives play out show that fate is unalterable depending on one's social standing in life. Andrea Gunraj has written a book that you won't be able to put down — a thrilling and excellent read."
—Musharraf Ali Farooqi, author of The Story of a Widow
"This is certainly a novel to relish, and I'm sure — I hope — we will see much more of Gunraj in the future."
—The Globe and Mail
Excerpt
Neela's abilities had first manifested themselves when she was ten and her brother, Navi, was twelve. Navi was the smart child, known throughout the neighbourhood for his ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide faster and better than any other twelve-year-old, and probably better than anyone else in Marasaw. He would pace around his grandmother's rickety wooden house in grey school shorts and an undershirt, using whatever he came upon to test his mathematical speed and accuracy. Twenty-seven and twelve tin cup is thirty-nine tin cup! A hundred and three by six tea towel is six hundred and eighteen tea towel! Neela's grandmother, only in her early forties when Neela and Navi were near puberty, encouraged her grandson's domestic calculation rampages. She challenged him to problem-solve questions: "If I throw seventy-seven black-eye pea in dis pot and boil it for forty-nine days, and spill two quart-a water straining de peas out, but forget de fire on and almost burn down de town by eleven o’clock, how much peas left?"
