Never My Father's Daughter

A mother’s murder. A family’s buried secrets. A daughter searching for the truth about where she came from.

When Aruvi is summoned to identify her mother’s body in suburban Melbourne, her world fractures in an instant.

Who killed her mother?

What begins as grief soon becomes a haunting search for answers. Questions her mother never answered. Silences that shaped her childhood. And a family history stretching across oceans to war-torn Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.

Moving between Melbourne and the Tamil heartlands of Sri Lanka, Never My Father’s Daughter is a powerful, multigenerational literary family saga following three generations of women bound by love, secrecy, loss, and survival. Born from the violence of a brutal civil war, Aruvi has grown up marked by whispers and the painful legacy of an absent father she never knew.

As she returns to the land of her ancestors, long-buried memories and family secrets begin to surface. Mango trees heavy with fruit. Jasmine woven into hair. Weddings and funerals. Mothers and militants. Love, courage, complicity, and the devastating truths a family has tried to keep hidden.

Each revelation draws Aruvi closer to understanding her mother, her family, and the mystery of her own identity.

Written with lyrical precision and emotional depth, Never My Father’s Daughter is an unforgettable novel about family secrets, motherhood, identity, belonging, the legacy of war, and the resilience of women who endure the unendurable.

A moving story of mothers and daughters, multigenerational family drama, cultural identity, inherited trauma, and survival, this sweeping literary fiction novel explores what war steals and what it leaves behind.

Perfect for readers of literary fiction, women’s fiction, multigenerational family sagas, historical and cultural fiction, and emotionally powerful stories about identity and belonging.

At once a family saga, a reckoning with history, and a quiet act of reclamation, Never My Father’s Daughter asks a haunting question:

Who are we when the story of our beginning has been erased?