In a deeply personal investigation, award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari takes us across three continents and back a century as she seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left him, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations?

Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi's life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women's lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after, and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first blush, shuns women for wanting lives of their own. (From House of Anansi Press)

Sadiya Ansari is a Pakistani Canadian journalist whose work has been featured in the Guardian, VICE, Refinery29, Maclean's, The Walrus and the Globe and Mail. She co-founded the Canadian Journalists of Colour. She is currently based in London, Ont.