Balli Bundle

Look inside Inheritance

In 1971, teenaged Amrit disappears from her house in the middle of the night. Although her absence is brief, she returns a different person, and the event causes fissures to develop that threaten to unravel her traditional Punjabi Sikh family. 

Over the next two decades, as Singapore’s political, social and cultural landscapes change, the family’s attempts to cope with the shifts lead to some disastrous consequences. How do we confront our legacies, and, when necessary, how do we accept change? Inheritance is a universal story of family, identity and belonging.

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.