Kandasamy novel on abusive marriage to Atlantic

Atlantic Books is to publish the second book by Meena Kandasamy in spring 2017.

Editor James Roxburgh acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding India) to When I Hit You, or A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife from David Godwin at DGA.

Informed and inspired by her own experiences, Kandasamy’s follow up to Gypsy Goddess (also Atlantic) is a "dazzling and provocative" novel of an abusive marriage. Seduced by politics and poetry, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife, but what for her is a contract of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back – a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape.  

Roxburgh said: “This book undid me. It is as fierce, smart, graceful and courageous as its author. It is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India. To my mind, there will not be a book published next year that is more important, more ugly but more profoundly beautiful than this one.”