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Start giftingIn Search of Amrit Kaur
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Learn moreAs she builds her own life anew, an Italian writer embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi.
On a sweltering day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself at a museum in Mumbai, enthralled by a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess. What she reads in the picture’s caption will change her life forever. This alluring Punjabi royal had supposedly sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year.
Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unreported? Almost against her will, Manera becomes drawn into the mystery. Delving into the history of the British Raj, its durbars and society balls and jubilees, she shows us the precipitous decline of India’s royal caste. The lives of extraordinary figures such as the Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, the Jewish banker Albert Kahn, and the Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich―all in a decades-long pursuit of the elusive Amrit Kaur.
When she rendezvouses with the princess’s eighty-year-old daughter, Sambuy’s search takes on a new dimension, as she strives to reconnect an orphan with the mother who abandoned her in 1933, leaving behind her two children, her raja husband, and a legacy of activism in India’s women’s civil rights movement.
In Search of Amrit Kaur is an engrossing detective story, a kaleidoscopic history lesson, and a moving portrait of women, across the century, seeking personal freedom.
Livia Manera Sambuy is an Italian writer whose book of profiles of American writers, Non Scrivere Di Me, was published in 2015. She is also the author and co-director of two documentary films on Philip Roth. She has been a staff writer at the literary pages of the Italian national daily Corriere della Sera for over twenty years. She lives in Paris.
Todd Portnowitz is the translator of The Greatest Invention; Long Live Latin; and Go Tell It to the Emperor: The Selected Poems of Pierluigi Cappello, for which he was awarded a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Nicola Gardini teaches Italian and comparative literature at Oxford University. He has translated works by Catullus and Marcus Aurelius into Italian, and his most recent novel, Lost Words, was awarded the Viareggio Literary Award and the Zerilli-Marimò/City of Rome Prize.
Todd Portnowitz is the translator of the poetry collections Go Tell It to the Emperor by Pierluigi Cappello and Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio, and the recipient of a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Reviews
“Livia Manera Sambuy is a wonderful detective-companion to lead us through this rich and complex world of princesses and prisoners-of-war, love and deceit, secrets and discovery. Teeming with incident and character, In Search of Amrit Kaur is a thoroughly engaging read.”
“Nuanced but relentlessly curious, Livia Manera Sambuy has a gift not only for listening to other people’s stories but for probing and unfolding exceptional narratives. In Search of Amrit Kaur…is her crowning jewel.”
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