sujata massey the widows of malabar hill

While her father is out arguing a case, Perveen reviews a letter from Faisal Mukri, the household agent of Omar Farid, the wealthy, recently deceased owner of a Bombay textile mill. Perveen’s investigations aim to reveal not only the identity of the killer but also the indignities suffered by women of all faiths.

Despite Perveen’s family wealth and influence in law and commerce, her legal training and fluency in several languages, as a woman, she’s not allowed admittance to the bar, which relegates Perveen to the offices of Mistry Law, reviewing and translating contracts and wills, preparing legal briefs, doing the accounting and advising on legal strategies argued by her father in the High Court. Perveen studied law at Oxford and by 1921 is back in Bombay, practicing at the firm led by her father, the esteemed Parsi barrister Jamshedji Mistry. Unable to let go of these fascinating historical figures, Massey transformed them into one Perveen Mistry, who first appeared in a 2015 novella and now in the full-length novel “The Widows of Malabar Hill.” Sujata Massey, author of 11 mysteries featuring Rei Shimura, a mixed-race Japanese American sleuth, discovered these pioneering women’s stories while researching 2013’s “The Sleeping Dictionary,” a historical novel set in Calcutta around the end of British colonial rule. Sorabji was the first woman to graduate from the University of Bombay, the first woman to read law at Oxford and India’s first female solicitor, while Lam also studied at Oxford and was the first Indian female barrister admitted to the Bombay High Court in 1923. To get an occasional newsletter from Sujata with events, giveaways, recipes and other news, sign up for the Sujata Massey author newsletter.Unless you’re a member of England’s Lincoln’s Inn or an avid Google Doodles follower, odds are you’ve probably never heard of Cornelia Sorabji or Mithan Tata Lam.

Sujata welcomes correspondence from authors at her website the Sujata Massey Author Facebook page and on Instagram You can also learn more about the history and visual inspiration for her books at the Pinterest handle, Perveen Mistry Novels. in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and wrote features for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before becoming a novelist. Paul, Minnesota, although her home for almost thirty years has been Baltimore, Maryland.

Sujata writes mystery and suspense fiction set in pre-Independence India, as well as a modern mystery series set in Japan.īorn in England to parents from India and Germany, Sujata was raised primarily in St. Her novels have won the Agatha, Lefty, Macavity and Mary Higgins Clark prizes and been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, and Harper Lee literary awards. Sujata Massey is the author of fourteen novels, two novellas and numerous short stories that have been published in eighteen countries.

Sujata massey the widows of malabar hill