| Author/Contributor(s): | Barrios, Carol Marques |
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Date: | 4/7/2026 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
Adopted by her mother's best friend and raised next door to her biological siblings, she grows up inside two families of Indian descent, in a colonial Caribbean society with a plan for her already written: leave school, marry well, run a household, arrange her own daughters' weddings one day.
She is thirteen when four parents choose her husband. She refuses him, publicly and disastrously, in a way her family's reputation will not quickly recover from.
At twenty-one she leaves St. Vincent for New York with a suitcase and no one's permission, and finds work at a sewing machine in the garment district. What she builds there, on a seamstress's wages and her own nerve, is a life of her own choosing, and a reckoning, years later, with the mother who gave her away.
Based on the true life of the author's grandmother, Mahala is a family saga about two mothers, one daughter, and where women get their nerve. Readers of Lisa Wingate, Susan Meissner, and Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake will love it.