Paperback: Welcome to Cinnamon Gardens, a home for those who are lost and the stories they treasure.
Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney - populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights - a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule.
But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents’ existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to storytelling and how our stories shape who we are.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens won the the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's biggest literary prize, on 25 July 2023. The 2023 judges were the State Library of NSW Mitchell librarian and chair Richard Neville, author and literary critic Bernadette Brennan, academic and translator Mridula Nath Chakraborty, critic James Ley and academic and poet Elfie Shiosaki. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is Shankari Chandran's third novel.
About the author: Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Song of the Sun God and The Barrier. Song of the Sun God was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award (2019) and short-listed for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award (2018). The Barrier was short-listed for the Norma K Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018). Song of the Sun God is being adapted for television, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran (no relation).
Her next novel (untitled) will be published by Ultimo Press in 2024. Her unpublished manuscript, a political thriller called Unfinished Business, will be published as an Audible Original in 2024, and is the first in her Ellie Harper thriller series.
Her short stories have been published in the critically acclaimed anthologies, Another Australia and Sweatshop Women (Vol 2) by Affirm Press/Sweatshop and she is the deputy chair of Writing NSW. She is particularly grateful for generous grants from the Blake-Beckett Scholarship Trust, Create NSW and the Australia Council for the Arts that have supported her to write.
Shankari has spent two decades working as a lawyer in the social justice field, on national and international program design and delivery. She continues her work in social impact for an Australian national retailer. She is based in Sydney, Australia, where she lives with her husband and her four children and explores dispossession and the creation of community through her fiction.
Rating: 5/5
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