When Simran dies suddenly in Berlin in 1989, Lekha, adrift and unfulfilled, travels to settle her estranged aunt’s affairs. Swept up in a city in flux, what begins as a brief, practical journey quickly unravels as an excavation of memory, longing, and forces that shape lives across time and place. Yet Simran’s story remains incomplete, at least until Prushna comes into view, her quiet audacity illuminating the hidden history of a family marked by Partition, exile and upheaval.

Light Across the Plains spans decades and continents, tracing the inextricable links between three generations of a family as they push against the confines of the times they live in and cling to the choices they make.

About the author:

Sharon Duggal is the author of the novels The Handsworth Times, Should We Fall Behind and Light Across the Plains. Her work has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, selected for BBC TV's book show, Between the Covers, chosen as a Prima Magazine Book of the Year and as the Morning Star’s Fiction Book of the Year 2016. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and leads postgraduate Creative Writing at West Dean College, Sussex. She was born in Birmingham and now lives in Brighton. 

PRAISE FOR LIGHT ACROSS THE PLAINS:

“Light Across the Plains is a tale of boundaries and borders and frontiers and walls, and of the necessity of crossing them, if not breaking them down. In a story that runs from Punjab to Birmingham to Brighton to Berlin, from the 1940s to the late 1980s, Duggal controls the narrative to produce an epic that stays intimate while also forming a shadow history of the second half of the 20th century. Duggal shows her storytelling ability in a book which holds its reveals until the final few pages: like all great plots, it is both inevitable and utterly unexpected.”

— C.D. Rose, author

“Sharon Duggal’s work is vivid, rich and enchanting. Light Across The Plains is incredibly moving and tender. Gloriously detailed storytelling and a vibrant honesty on every bold and generous page”

— Salena Godden, poet and author

“A beautiful story, full of wonderful writing, set down with elegance, courage and compassion. Epic in ambition and full of heartfelt, piercing insights; it is a story that will change lives and hearts”

— Katy Massey, author

“Beautiful… poised, tender and profoundly affecting”

— Mark A. Radcliffe, author

“Vivid, impeccably researched, delicately rendered exploration of the lives of three generations of women seeking love, purpose and freedom, and the barriers – both real and imagined – placed on them. Poignant, devastating and ultimately hopeful, it’s a gem”

— Laura Wilkinson, author

“Sharon Duggal writes with both ambition and warmth, finding powerful moments of intimacy for her characters within the broad social sweep of her fiction. It's a rare and wonderful combination”

— Ed Hogan, author

“With deft confidence, Duggal finely, meticulously, outlines a cultural and political backdrop scaling decades and continents, while excavating unspoken family history, deeply buried secrets and the inevitability of change”

— Yvvette Edwards, author

REVIEWS OF PREVIOUS WORK:

Should We Fall Behind: "At its heart the novel is a spacious, melancholy work, its sorrowful yet hopeful storylines an elegy to time's passing."

— Catherine Taylor, The Guardian 

"Sharon Duggal affirms that there is such a thing as society, in which there are communities with shared values and interests. She does so with passion and integrity but without tub-thumping, and her generous, humane novel is all the stronger for it."

— David Collard, The Times Literary Supplement

"Duggal writes about the devastation of vulnerable lives with all the hard-eyed clarity of William Trevor, and as much literary heart as Rohinton Mistry... Should We Fall Behind deeply inhabits its world but wears its craft so lightly – it is beautifully observed, suffused with inner-city melancholy and shot through with hope…"

— Preti Taneja, award-winning author

"Duggal's observational and forensic skills in developing her characters are such that her story never devolves into proselytising. Instead, her writing sincerely, sensitively and unaffectedly navigates secret sorrows, disappointments, regrets and failures in unflinching detail... It makes for a generous and deeply affecting novel."

— Dzifa Benson, Wasafiri

The Handsworth Times:

"The Handsworth Times, utterly of a specific place and time but also universal in its themes, is a prose act of praise to the humanist spirit that will never succumb to fear and hatred. It is quite simply the most accomplished, complete and startlingly authentic novel I have read this year."

— Paul Simon, The Morning Star

"The Handsworth Times is an outstanding work in every aspect. It conveys a visceral sense both of time and place... gifted with fiction's first requirements, a rattling good yarn and an engaging cast of characters, managed with consummate and effortless skill."

— Robb Johnson, writer

For press enquiries contact:

Field PR | clairesrmaxwell@googlemail.com