Where Monsoons Cry; Stories
Black Words Press
ISBN: 1-888018-32-1
Trade Paper/240 pp.
Price: $12.95 (Free Shipping, within US. Request signed copy if desired.)
Ships: 1-2 days
Great Britain/India/Australia/New Zealand by Air
Price: $21.39 including shipping
Reviews of Where Monsoons Cry
“The author’s powerful evocative stories, written in a style that is pellucid and precise, yet opulent in emotion and unstinting in detail, capture the complexities of cultures, the conundrums of history, and contradictions of many varieties of love.”
— David Bradley, judge of Maryland Artscape 1997
“The short-story winner…evokes family life, student days, increasing awareness as a girl matures. Noronha conveys powerful emotion amid the gul-mohurs, the kesars, the diwalis.”
— James Bready, from the Baltimore Sun article, “Books of the region: murder, monsoons,” August 24th, 1997
“Lalita Noronha resists tradition’s dark gravity and sails the stormy sea of expectations and relationships like a Bombay version of John Updike. Her emotional stories teem with cross-cultural lovers gone awry, arranged marriages, bribery, ghosts, and broken dreams. Her women characters are at turns feminist, subservient, naïve, hungry, lonely, or lost. And yet when a girl baby is born there is hope amid the hoopla and tears, despite the negative spin of family and tradition. As an author Lalita Noronha is difficult to resist. As a reader you will encounter another strong voice in what appears to be a tidal wave of talent from Asia.”
— Richard Peabody, editor of Gargoyle Magazine
“When Monsoons Cry is a beautiful, heartbreaking collection of stories from a gifted new writer. Bravo to Lalita Noronha, and I look forward to reading more of her fiction.”
— Sujata Massey, author of The Samurai’s Daughter
“In this striking first collection of short stories a tough intelligence explores with lyric grace the hurts of history sustained by a young woman during the first migrant moments of dislocation as in ‘This Is America’ to the harsh logic of an unequal cross-cultural encounter in ‘Deep Wells.’ Where Monsoons Cry can be read as a novel, we discover that the secrets we are unearthing from each individual character are perhaps the authentic secrets of history. There is about this book an air of something being retold, something old and true. The circling detour of memory crossing and re-crossing allows the author to reach into the past, render the present and even gaze at the future. The unspeakable is captured in prose so radiant that it impels one to read aloud certain passages in order to savor its cadences. Here is a writer of haunting presence and subtle surprises.”
— J. Birjepatil, author of Chinnery’s Hotel
“Lalita Noronha covers a range of situations and characters with an emotional intelligence that is both fresh and startling, drawing its core from the encounter of cultures. To describe it conventionally as a clash of cultures diminishes the power of this collection of stories. She serves up elaborate dances between the protagonists in her stories with an economy of words that renders the interactions more powerful and the emotions more raw. In simple, unaffected language, Noronha injects into her stories themes of yearning, isolation, loneliness and the timorous awakening to a new culture by young and older migrants who will ever go home again. Using metaphors from the “old country”, Noronha returns repeatedly to the scene of numerous denouements, often set in the India she remembers so vividly, where every sip of tea masks an emotion or an encounter that changes lives forever. These stories offer a refreshing, loving tribute to the the most powerful emotions that course through the lives of characters whose inherent complexities are masked by simple actions.”
— Rohit Shukla, CEO, Larta Institute, Los Angeles
“Noronha captures the disconnect and longing of the immigrant, and given we live in a land of immigrants, this book has a resonance for all who made the hard bargain between staying and leaving.”
–Susan McCallum-Smith, Urbanite
“Lalita Noronha, who has a Ph.D. in microbiology, can be said to have a “talent” for science. With her first collection of short stories Where Monsoons Cry, she can be said to have a talent for fiction too. Amazingly, in addition to being a scientist, she is also a writer — a rather good one, too.”
–Michelle Reale, India Currents
“…an intelligent and moving read…the author creates interesting and introspective characters.”
— Virginia Crawford, from WordHouse
Lalita Noronha 