Inheritance

“Inheritance is a moving and assured debut, a perfectly balanced allegory, where the individual struggles of a family are underscored by the larger picture of nationbuilding and national identity. Balli Kaur Jaswal writes with compassion, intelligence and an empathetic eye, transporting the reader effortlessly through time and between points of view.”
—Leanne Hall, author of This Is Shyness

“Jaswal’s wonderful debut didn’t merely transport me to a country I knew nothing about, or introduce me to a family the likes of which I’d never meet. She made me long for her Singapore like a lost home, and miss her characters like departed friends. What an extraordinary thing for a novel to do.”
—Alexander Yates, author of Moondogs

“A vivid, compelling tale of selfhood, fraught blood ties and the devastating weight of change.”
—Meg Mundell, author of Black Glass

Balli Kaur Jaswal is the recipient of The Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist Award 2014 for Inheritance, which inspired a film adaptation directed by K. Rajagopal, called Lizard on the Wall. Her second novel, Sugarbread, was shortlisted for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize, while her most recent book, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick in 2018. Born in Singapore and raised in Japan, Russia and the Philippines, she studied creative writing in the United States, and has received writing fellowships from the University of East Anglia and Nanyang Technological University. Her fourth novel, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters, will be published in the USA and UK in 2019.