Coffer Dams

Clinton, founder and head of a firm of international engineers, arrives in India to build a dam, bringing with him his young wife, Helen, and a strong team of aides and skilled men. They are faced with a formidable challenge, which involves working in daunting mountain and jungle terrain, within a time schedule dictated by the extreme tropical weather. Setbacks occur which bring into focus fundamental differences in the attitudes to life and death of the British bosses and the Indian workers. If the coffer dams are allowed to stand, the lives of local tribespeople will be put in jeopardy.

Reviews

‘It is set in modern India, but the conflict of values at its heart is universal.’ – John Masters, author of Bhowani Junction.

‘Kamala Markandaya initiates a new era of imaginative literature about the subcontinent in which old ghosts are laid and the mind is free to turn to a new and vastly different but equally problematical, complex and baffling India’ – David Rubin, author of After the Raj.

‘For the last 20 years of her life, Kamala Markandaya couldn’t get published and went out of print. Generations of readers lost out on reading this gem. Now I hope it will find its place in literary history.’ – Bernadine Evaristo on The Nowhere Man.