When Nobody Asked Why

Some questions take forty years to ask.Claudette, Eliane and Nadine grew up in the same Mauritian kitchen. Sixty years later, they remember it three different ways.Claudette, the talker, kept a ledger of every slight. Nadine, who never stopped moving, crossed a border under another woman's name and survived nine months she has never fully described. Eliane, the quiet one, built a life from education, detention and divorce, and kept her own silences. Now each of them is in her sixties, living in England and Germany, carrying her own version of the family's past.Then Claudette begins looking for a wife for her son Arjun. Eliane knows the perfect woman: Nadine's daughter, Amara. She also knows exactly why Claudette will refuse to hear her name.As one old family wound resurfaces, a battered biscuit tin, a letter never read, and a question nobody dared ask force three women to look back at the help given, the help withheld, and the love that went unnoticed.When Nobody Asked Why is a moving family saga about migration, money, pride and motherhood. It asks what we owe the people who helped us, and what we pass on to the generation after us.