Never My Father's Daughter

Never My Father’s Daughter is a powerful, sweeping novel of identity, inheritance, and the truths that refuse to stay buried.When Aruvi is summoned to identify her mother’s body in suburban Melbourne, her world fractures in an instant. Who killed her mother? What begins as grief soon becomes something far more unsettling: questions her mother never answered, silences that shaped her childhood, and a past that stretches across oceans - to war-torn Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.Moving between Melbourne and the Tamil heartlands of Sri Lanka, this deeply intimate story traces three generations of women bound by love, secrecy, and survival. Born of violence during a brutal civil war, Aruvi grows up marked by whispers - child of rape - and by the brutal legacy of an absent father she never knew. As she returns to the land of her ancestors, memories surface: mango trees heavy with fruit, jasmine woven into hair, weddings and funerals, militants and mothers, courage and complicity. Each revelation pulls her closer to a truth her family has long tried to protect her from.Written with lyrical precision and emotional restraint, Never My Father’s Daughter explores the cost of silence and the resilience of women who endure the unendurable. It is a story about what war steals, and what it leaves behind. About motherhood forged under impossible circumstances. About the meaning of belonging when bloodlines are fractured and names are withheld.At once a family saga, a reckoning with history, and a quiet act of reclamation, this novel asks a haunting question:Who are we, when the story of our beginning has been erased? Read more