Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a 'coolie' -indentured labourers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and travelling alone, this woman, likeso many of the indentured, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother's story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on complex lives.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize, and winner of the 2014 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book about the Caribbean, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora - from India to the West Indies in one century, and from Guyana to the United States in the next. It is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.