Booktagger

When the family’s rubber-plantation servant girl is dismissed for unnamed crimes, it is only the latest in a series of precipitous losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha’s life. In the space of several weeks her grandmother died under
mysterious circumstances and her older sister, Uma, left for Columbia University, gone forever.

Circling through years of family history to arrive at the moment of Uma’s departure -- stranding her worshipful younger sister in a family, and a country, slowly going to pieces -- Evening is the Whole Day illuminates in heartbreaking detail one Indian immigrant family’s layers of secrets and lies, while exposing the complex underbelly of Malaysia itself.

Sweeping in scope, exuberantly lyrical, and masterfully constructed, Preeta Samarasan’s debut is a mesmerising and vital achievement.

‘Rich, quirky and colourful, Evening is the Whole Day captures not just the sense of a family struggling to deal with its past, but the crazy uncertainty of a country coming to terms with itself’ -- Tash Aw

‘a surpassingly wise and beautiful debut novel about the tragic consequences of the inability to love’ – Booklist