Salt and Starlight
Kiran Desai's life is built on logic. As a geologist, she trusts the unyielding truth of stone and the steady passage of millennia, not the whispers of a past she's tried to forget. But when she is forced to return to her ancestral home on the storm-wracked coast of Mauritius to settle her grandmother's estate, the island refuses to be a silent relic. The ghost of her grandmother's unfinished business-and a legendary local curse-cling to the salt-scarred house.
Theo, a historian dedicated to preserving the island's fading stories, sees Kiran as his last hope to document the truth before it vanishes forever. He believes the key lies in a forbidden love story between a 19th-century Indian indentured labourer and a Creole sea-healer, a union that fractured the very fabric of the island and led to a tragedy the tides have never forgotten. As a malevolent force stirs, Kiran and Theo must unravel the tangled threads of history and magic. To break the cycle, Kiran will have to embrace the starlit heritage she denied and unlock a power written not in rock, but in salt water and blood, before the past drowns them all.