Queen of Dreams - Softcover

Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing with her family and with a world in alarming transition. Her mother is a dream teller, born with the ability to share and interpret the dreams of others, to foresee and guide them through their fates. This gift of vision fascinates Rakhi but also isolates her from her mother's past in India and the dream world she inhabits, and she longs for something to bring them closer. Caught beneath the burden of her own painful secret, Rakhi's solace comes in the discovery, after her mother's death, of her dream journals, which begin to open the long-closed door to her past.
As Rakhi attempts to divine her identity, knowing little of India but drawn inexorably into a sometimes painful history she is only just discovering, her life is shaken by new horrors. In the wake of September 11, she and her friends must deal with dark new complexities about their acculturation. Haunted by nightmares beyond her imagination, she nevertheless finds unexpected blessings: the possibility of new love and understanding for her family.
"A dream is a telegram from the hidden world," Rakhi's mother writes in her journals. In lush and elegant prose, Divakaruni has crafted a vivid and enduring dream, one that reveals hidden truths about the world we live in, and from which readers will be reluctant to wake.

Praise for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
"Divakaruni is gifted with dramatic inventiveness [and] lyrical, sensual language." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Divakaruni is an incomparable storyteller. . . . . Part of the beauty of her talent is her ability to capture the true complexity of the emotional landscape in her characters." --Denver Post

"Divakaruni is a brilliant storyteller, illuminating the depths of need and the glitter of hope in the push-pull of growth and self-restraint. . . . Divakaruni is a transplanted cultural treasure." --Seattle Times

"Among contemporary writers from India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni fills a space all her own. . . . Her fiction draws a line straight to the heart." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Reading Divakaruni is a pleasure. She paints worlds of complex characters and cultures with an absorbing story line and beautiful language that reads like poetry." --The Oregonian

"Divakaruni's stories are as irresistible as the impulse that leads her characters to surface into maturity, raising their heads above floods of silver ignorance." --New York Times Book Review
"[Divakaruni] beautifully blends the chills of reality with the rich imaginings of a fairy tale." --Wall Street Journal