Quick Reviews: Touching Earth

Touching Earth by Rani Manicka opens with the graveyard and the narrators long gone but reminiscing about their lives. Then the novel plunges into the beautiful vistas of Bali to feast on; its power and the magic that can beguile anyone. It is Nutan, one of the twins who is narrating the story, who herself is about to tell a story but she starts with her childhood: the typical fairy tale start of innocence when she lived with her twin, Zeenat and her mother, grandmother and father. But therein lay a dark secret that is cut wide open right at the beginning. And that sets the course for the lives of the Balinese twins.