The Wild Wind

By Sheena Kalayil

From the winner of the 2018 Writers' Guild Award

Vanish to a different land with Sissy Olikara. Sissy is twelve years old, living with her parents and baby brother on a school campus outside Lusaka. It is 1978, and the political situation in Zambia is becoming volatile. The family enjoy a gentle life until, suddenly, Sissy's father leaves and returns to India.

His departure brings about a chain of events which force Sissy into the adult world and have profound, long-lasting consequences.

Moving back and forth in time as the adult Sissy reflects on her childhood, The Wild Wind is a haunting, absorbing coming-of-age tale of lost loves and lost innocence - one that takes readers on a journey into a young woman's past and its repercussions on her future.

Featured on the Guardian’s ‘NOT THE BOOKER LONGLIST, 2019’

(https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/not-the-booker-prize)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Polygon
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788852210

Sheena Kalayil

Sheena Kalayil was born in Zambia in 1970 where her parents were teachers seconded from India.  She arrived in the UK aged eighteen and, after graduating, worked all over the world in countries such as Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Equatorial Guinea, Slovenia and Spain, before returning to the UK, to Edinburgh in 2002. She has a doctorate in Linguistics and teaches at the University of Manchester. She lives near Manchester with her husband and two daughters.