Soul Climate

by Inez Baranay

English 272 pages 1 edition

‘Baranay writes evocatively… raising serious questions within vivid description.’ — Sydney Morning Herald Turkish freedom fighter, author, and citizen of the world, Halide Edib travels to India in 1935 to deliver a series of lectures, fulfilling a promise made long ago to Indian nationalist, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari. In Delhi, her host’s rambling house in Daryaganj is a place of inclusive hospitality and of historical meetings. Here, Halide meets many people central to India’s own independence struggle, specially Mahatma Gandhi, with whom she has several conversations. Before she departs, Halide promises to write a memoir of her time in India. The present narrator of Soul Climate peruses that memoir, and other writings by Halide, wondering what else she might have seen and remembered. In another strand of the novel that is pure fiction, three young women, close friends and cousins, who are attending Halide’s lectures in Delhi, are each at a turning point in their lives, taking first steps on their separate new paths. To each of them Halide’s words and personality speak differently, and they form their world views even as they get swept up in the process of their coming of age. Soul Climate deftly interweaves memoir and fiction, realism and imagination. Through it, we consider afresh such ideas as nationhood, religion, idealism, what makes us, and what divides us and how we unite.