To Read & To Write

The idea to write this novel came from a famous painting - titled "An Indian Lady" - by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey. The painting (which can be found in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin) sparked Mary Finn's interest in writing a fictional story about an Irishman wed to an Indian woman. In her novel "Anila's Journey", readers will meet a compelling girl named Anila, who is half Irish and half Bengali. She is born during the eighteenth century. Finn portrays the hardships within the world of colonial India: a world where cultures intertwine amid political unrest, creating social tensions within the family group and beyond. "Anila's Journey" fills this dark backdrop with vivid prose and mesmerizing poetry. In colonial India during the late 18th century, racism ran rampant, and so there is a thread which runs within these pages that holds the issue of race relations. Yet, Mary Finn does not exploit this cultural phenomenon in her w...