Fifteen-year-old Noemi has no choice but to leave school and work in the house of the wealthy De Grandbourg family, just across the road from the Mauritian slums where she grew up. She encounters a world that is starkly different from her own yet one which would have been all too familiar to her ancestors. Bewitched by a pair of green eyes and haunted by echoes, her life begins to mirror those of girls who have gone before her. In Riambel, Priya Hein invites us to protest, to rail against longstanding structures of class and ethnicity. She shows us a world of natural enchantment contrasted with violenceand the abuse of power, a flawed paradise undergoing slow but unstoppable change. This seemingly simple tale of servitude, seduction and abandonment blisters with a fierce sense of injustice.
