Book review
`Should he, as my father, have been telling any of this to me? Was it right for me, as his son, to be receiving his confidences on such an intimate matter?'

A work of extraordinary intensity and candour, The Red Letters is the poignant story of Ved Mehta's discovery of his father's love affair with a married woman in the 1930s.

As he begins his quest to unravel a family mystery, Ved Mehta is forced to confront his father's clandestine relationship with the enchanting Rasil. Ved's father first meets Rasil, a shepherd girl from the Punjab hills, in his youth. Their affair begins fifteen years later when their paths cross again—Rasil is now a Lahore socialite, trapped in an abusive marriage to a rich businessman. Their passion is kept alive by the exchange of love letters—the Red Letters—that Mehta's father treasures for the remainder of his life.

Ved Mehta's voyage into his father's past is both revealing and painful, as the son finds out that his father's affair, a brief episode in a loving marriage of sixty-one years, had a devastating effect on his mother—a close friend of Rasil's—as well as on his own life.

An exquisitely written story that unveils universal truths through its compelling reconstruction of the author's family history, The Red Letters is the eleventh and final book in Ved Mehta's acclaimed Continents of Exile autobiographical series.

About the author Ved Mehta was born in Lahore in 1934. Totally blind since the age of four, he has lived in America since 1949. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Harvard University, he began writing at the age of twenty, and was on the staff of The New Yorker for thirty-three years. His twenty-four books include classic accounts of modern India and of Mahatma Gandhi, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheims and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. The Red Letters is the final installment of his autobiographical series, Continents of Exile. Some of the other books in the series are Daddyji, Mamaji, Vedi, The Stolen Light, Up at Oxford, Remembering Mr Shaun's New Yorker and All for Love.