Email Almeda Glenn Miller: agmiller@telus.net

Web Page: www.almedaglennmiller.com

Tiger Dreams, Almeda Glenn Miller's complex first novel, explores the story of Claire Spencer, a woman of Anglo-Indian heritage who travels with her boyfriend, David, from Canada to Pune, India, to visit an old crippled relative who knew Claire's grandfather, the superintendent of the prison where Gandhi was jailed in the '30s. Claire is working on a documentary film about her Grandpa Denzil and his young wife, Alice, and the story includes long flashbacks to their lives during Gandhi's time. Claire feels closely connected to Alice, and the author draws a wonderful portrait of this character and the period.

Miller has a genuine feel for India and captures well its combination of blaring chaos and gentility, its strange mix of calm and violence. She can write with a sharp descriptive eye: "Marble shutters, tarnished by the fingers of women in Purdah, cast filigreed sunlight into narrow hallways," and "The pipes cramped when she shut off the water." Less successful are the film sequences interspersed throughout the book, which add little to the story and tend to muddy the plot with their dream-like tiger scenes. A highlight of the novel, and its most fully realized section, is Claire and David's visit to the dusty prison in Pune. The Indian characters in this section leap off the page, and the suspense is well-sustained. A fine first effort. --Mark Frutkin

Second Review

Tiger Dreams by Almeda Glenn Miller is a very ambitious novel, probably too ambitious for a debut. It is the story of a Canadian woman, Claire, a documentary film maker mourning the loss of her Anglo-Indian father, who travels to India and meets her only surviving relative, a cousin of her grandmother's. She begins researching the life and death of her grandmother, the wife of Gandhi's jailer during the 1930's, and finds a lot more than she bargained for. The structure is quite awkward, with each chapter set up as a potential part of a film. This is such a fine story that it does not need pretentious gimmicks. The chapters jump back and forth in time and are sometimes hard to keep track of. The writing, however, is exceptional. Miller has the soul of a poet and some of the language is both surprising and moving. The novel is much too long, and the tiger symbolism is heavy handed, very Creative writing Class 101.

Claire suffers from a hereditary heart problem. One universal truth about fiction and life is that everyone wants to talk about their physical ailments, while no one wants to listen. Another is that family histories are only interesting to the family and sometimes not even to them. The atmosphere of India is well captured-the influence of A Passage to India is obvious: there is a lot of Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore here. Miller shows extraordinary promise, and my feeling is that it is too bad this isn't her third novel, for with a little more experience Tiger Dreams might have been something marvelous.- W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)

Book Description

Mourning the recent loss of her Anglo-Indian father and struggling with her own mortality, a 30-something documentary filmmaker named Claire travels from Canada to Pune, India, to visit her elderly cousin Charlotte. As Claire rummages through Charlotte¹s keepsakes, she discovers the untold story of her grandmother Alice Maud Spencer, the wife of Gandhi¹s jailer in the waning days of the Raj. So begins Tiger Dreams, an engrossing and accomplished first novel about one Canadian woman¹s discovery of India and her own heritage.

About the Author

Almeda Glenn Miller wrote this novel for her grandmother, a woman she never knew. Almeda is the former owner of Goldrush Books in Rossland, B.C., and currently teaches creative writing at both Kootenay School of the Arts and Selkirk College, Canada.