UMA PARAMESWARAN Professor of English, University of Winnipeg email: uma_param @ yahoo . com (remove spaces)

A Cycle of the Moon a novel

It is a tense autumn the year Mayura comes away from her husband, saying she will never return to the uncouth, lustful monster. Everyone in the family is affected by her arrival. A sense of collective guilt emasculates the men even as they lecture her on the moral duty of returning to her wedded husband. A sense of outrage mingled with secret sorrow overcomes the women. No one knows what to make of Mayura. Meanwhile she behaves as though nothing and nobody can touch her. Using a deceptively simple and intimate style, Parameswaran explores the subtleties of love, marriage and family life in a changing South Indian environment.

As the stories in this highly imaginative collection attest, our passage from the known into the unknown can occur anywhere. Whether hiking the Himalayas, getting high in a scuzzy nightclub, or managing the last book store on Earth, each of these remarkable characters stands at the gate between this world and the next. Surreal, speculative, and sometimes downright eerie, this is fiction that will give you that rare, pleasurable tingle up the back of your neck. -- Catherine Hunter

"A hymn to the joys and sorrows of family, in the best, most inclusive sense of the word." - Andreas Schroeder

A collection of poems by award-winning author Uma Parameswaran. These voices capture the experiences of Indo-Canadians. Collectively, the poems addresses various phases of immigrant experience from nostalgia for the land left behind and wonder at the new environment, through the realities of racial discrimination, pressures of settlement and struggle to strike roots, to the final affirmation that "Home is where your feet are, and may your heart be there too."

"A deftly wrought novella possessing a quiet eloquence born of outrage." - The Globe and Mail "Belongs to the genres of engage literature, roman a these and feminist fiction. It is activist literature, woman-empowering fiction and it has a political edge. It aims to create understanding, social support and legal change ..." - Herizons

What Was Always Hers: Winner of the 2000 Canadian Authors' Assn "Jubilee Award"!

From the jacket: Enlightened, compassionate and humorous, these stories and a novella explore relationships, especially women-oriented relationships, and the experiences of Indo-Canadians. This book is the winner of the 2000 Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Award and the 1999 New Muse Award for the best short fiction collection. One reader wrote, "I can't put your story down! Your writing tugs away at my heart strings! You have a subtle way of taking something so common and everyday and endowing that commonplace dignity. " [Manjusree Sen] Read what others are saying about the book.

Uma Parameswaran is known for her contributions to the emerging field of South Asian Canadian Literature (SACLIT, the name she coined). Be sure you have the following SACLIT series in your library: Trishanku and Other Writings Sons Must Die and Other Plays SACLIT - An Introduction SACLIT Drama and Five or Six Characters in Search of Toronto Land Where the Trees Talk and Other Plays Click on book covers for more information.

Web pages maintained by Uma's press secretary, biggest fan and daughter, Raji.
Last modified 17 March 2004.