Raise the Lanterns High

On the eve of her wedding in 1960s Trinidad, Vasti discovers that her arranged marriage is to the rapist she saw through a curtain of sugarcane stems 12 years earlier. Will she speak out, defying convention and thereby shaming her family, or succumb to tradition and silently submit to her fate? Terrified, she collapses and dreams the parallel story that runs through the novel where the three surviving wives of an 18th-century king in northern India are about to climb upon a burning pyre to fulfill the suttee, the traditional Hindu widow-burning custom practiced in India for hundreds of years.