About the Book
These words, whispered by a madman, haunt Jamshed Fali Irani. The young heir to a business empire in Bombay, he is in Goa to try and pursue his dream of being a writer. Locked away in a crumbling, decrepit mansion, struggling to write as the monsoon rains down, the wind brings to him the cries of a little girl wandering the ruins nearby. Alice is trying to find her sister, Sara, who went missing years before. Jamshed makes a reluctant promise to help her, and finds himself drawn into a story that is darker and more intriguing than any he could have imagined. With his new friend, Tania, to whom he is increasingly drawn, Jamshed attempts to unravel the mystery behind Sara’s disappearance.
Jamshed’s search leads him into a tangled tale of loyalty and deceit, at the heart of which lies murder. He has to find his way through a bewildering maze of contradictions as he tries to thread together answers to a mystery that involves a girl with the voice of an angel, a violin that plays the sorrows of the heart, and the bond between two friends who swear that not even death will do them part.
In this vividly written Gothic novel, alive with the sights and smells of pre-Independence Goa, Venita Coelho tells a captivating, suspenseful, sweeping tale like no other.
About the Author
Venita Coelho is a screenwriter, novelist and artist with ten published books to her credit. She has won The Hindu Goodreads Award for Best Fiction for children twice, in 2016 for Dead as a Dodo and in 2019 for Boy No. 32. Her collection of feminist ghost stories, The Washer of the Dead, was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor award.
She lives in Goa where she runs an alternative school called The Path Shaala. She is working towards her second exhibition of paintings.
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