Long Listed for The Asian Man Literature Prize when published in India as THE LAST PRETENCE.When Malika loses her longed-for daughter at birth, it is not the only loss in the family: the surviving twin -a boy - loses the love of his mother. He grows up needing to be the daughter his mother wants, the son his scientist father accepts, and more, with the guilt of being the one who survived. In a recently independent India, haunted by its colonial past and striving to find its identity, he struggles to find his own self. Sarayu Srivatsa has created a moving family portrait, richly-coloured by the vibrant culture and landscape of India, where history, religion and gender collide in a family scarred by the past and struggling with the future.

Saroja, the pseudo-intellectual who owns and runs the Victorian dyes factory; Kamala, the eunuch, who carries within her a painful past; and Raman, the mosquito-scientist whose experiment with the malarial insect comes to be known as the Raman Technique. Then there is the ghost of Elizabeth Gibbs, the bored English woman who slept with her equally bored brother George and gave birth to a hermaphrodite. And Nayantara, who teaches Mallika all there is to know about love. But above all, this is the story of Mallika and Siva - a mother and son in a complex and deeply disturbing relationship.