Its the early 1960s. And a six year-old girl of Indian descent is uprooted from her family home in Tukuyu when her father is diagnosed with cancer. She leaves the familiar tall grasses of her southern highland home town for the dust and thorny trees of Dodoma to live at her grandparents flourmill, and the girls ideas about home, belonging, and identity begin to crumble. Blue Sunflower Startle offers the reader select mementoes of a childhood stubbornly affixed to place and an adulthood spent often in the air. Written in unusual, intoxicating, and poetic prose, Ladha has written a modern day Romance for frequent travellers and restless, rootless spirits.
