This page-turning reading group novel follows Asha, a young South Indian woman growing up in Australia, frustrated with her mother’s secretiveness about her past. When the family return to South India, Asha is determined to discover what her mother is hiding – but when her investigation leads her to dark secrets, can she come to terms with the truth?
THE WANTED GIRL
by Rajasree Variyar
Orion UK, Spring 2023
Sydney, 2019. Twenty-five-year-old Asha, who has grown up in Australia, knows very little of her mother’s past in India. As far as her Amma is concerned, the past doesn’t matter, it’s their future that counts. But when Asha’s paternal grandfather is taken ill, her beloved father requests that they return to Madurai to see him, and he wants the whole family to go. Asha is fascinated by what her mother is hiding, and determined to discover the truth about her background: knowing all the while that she is also hiding something from her family.
Madurai, 1992. Janani is a young mother trapped in an unhappy marriage, under pressure from her husband and mother-in-law to give birth to a son. Daughters are expensive to raise and rarely survive birth, with families often taking matters into their own hands to ensure this. But Janani has a dream – a dream of escaping her misery, of finding love, and experiencing happiness. And, above all, of protecting her children no matter what.
As Asha delves deeper into the truth, she starts to suspect what her mother has been running from for all these years. But can she forgive her for everything she has hidden?
Similar to A Thousand Splendid Suns in its sweeping depiction of the plight of women, Where the Crawdads Sing, and The Beekeeper of Aleppo.
Born in Bangalore and raised in Sydney, Australia, Rajasree Variyar has been a Londoner for the last five years, where she juggles writing alongside a career in insurance. She received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2020. Her manuscript of THE WANTED GIRL was shortlisted for the 2019 Mo Siewcharran/Hachette UK prize. Her short stories have won second prize in the Shooter Literary Magazine short story competition in 2019 and been long-listed for the Brick Lane Bookshop short story competition in 2020.
Hamburg, 1887. The young flower girl Tine Tiedkens is destitute. To escape her misery, she decides to try her luck on the island of Heligoland. But the crossing to the fashionable island turns into a nightmare, and when she arrives everything seems set against her. But then she unexpectedly runs into the young hotelier Henry Heesters, who once bought flowers from her in Hamburg, and lands a position in his elegant hotel. With diligence and enthusiasm, Tine works her way up from waitress to housekeeper – and falls in love with Henry. He, too, loves her – but just as happiness seems to be within reach, fate intervenes once again…
If you meet Mari, you will notice that she is beautiful and almost hauntingly perfect. But also that she fails to get jokes and vies everything rationally. And if you get to know her better, you will notice that Mari needs neither sleep nor food. Because Mari is only almost human. Her artificial intelligence is constantly learning to do one job: to make people happy. When Mari ends up in a Berlin apartment after an unfortunate chain of circumstances with a motley crew of people, including the rebellious blogger Frieda and the lonely student Linus, she realizes that her mission is all but easy. The world follows its own logic, people’s desires are irrational and Mari has to understand that there exists a world beyond provable facts. How is she supposed to make beings happy that have no clue what they want? She comes up with a solution no human would have ever expected… DER ALGORITHMUS DER MENSCHLICHKEIT deals with questions that are becoming incredibly important in the current developments in the technology sector: What makes us human? Why do we need each other? And why do we actually need more of each other, and less of the new technologies that are constantly being developed?
Through the lens of its patriarch, THE FAMILY IZQUIERDO deftly weaves together the lives of different members of the Izquierdo clan to paint the picture of a Mexican-American family bound together by love, and a curse. From young love to a failing marriage, from a mother afraid to leave her house to a young woman moving far from her family to try to find her way, Papa Tavo watches as his children and grandchildren try to navigate their way through a confusing and painful world. But it’s hard when a neighbor’s black magic hechizos affect their ability to live their lives. 
La société de production FilmNation prépare une adaptation long-métrage du roman THE PEOPLE WE HATE AT THE WEDDING de Grant Ginder. Cette comédie, décrite comme le Quatre mariages et un enterrement de la nouvelle génération, sera réalisée par Claire Scanlon (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Glow…). Sont pressentis pour les rôles principaux : Allison Janney (La Couleur des sentiments, Juno, The Hours, Hairspray, Moi, Tonya…), Annie Murphy (Schitt’s Creek) et Ben Platt (Pitch Perfect, Cher Evan Hansen). Aucune date de sortie n’a été annoncée pour le moment. (Lire l’