Contemporary Literary Romance
WHERE IS
Home?
a novel by Katherine Mathura
Some loves teach you where you belong. His taught her to keep asking.
“Where is home, Stewart?”
“Wit me, lil lady, wit me.”
The Book
A first love written in sugarcane and starlight
In a sugarcane village in 1970s Trinidad, fourteen-year-old Katy has always felt like she arrived on the wrong island, in the wrong life — a dreamer hemmed in by her mother's ambitions and the small, watchful world of the cane fields. Then a stranger leans against a newspaper building wall and asks her to take him home, and nothing about home means the same thing again.
Stewart is beautiful, restless, and entirely wrong for her — the wrong colour, the wrong family, the wrong side of every line her mother has drawn. He is also, impossibly, the one person who feels like recognition. Across convent-school afternoons, hidden gardens, Christmas parang and secret rivers, their love unfolds in a Trinidad rendered in sugar and rum, indentureship and calypso, colonial bridges and rainforest streams — a world Katy is only beginning to understand is hers.
But some loves are given to teach us how to leave, not how to stay. Where Is Home? is a lush, sensory coming-of-age romance about first love, identity, and the ache of a question that outlasts the person who first asked it.
The Island
A story that could only happen here
The Village
A close-knit sugarcane community descended from indentured labourers, where the parlour counter and the harvest season set the rhythm of every day — and every reputation is common knowledge.
The Gardens
Beneath baobabs carried across an ocean and silk cotton trees rooted in old folklore, a hidden garden becomes the one place the two of them are allowed to simply belong to each other.
The Island
From the Northern Range to Maracas Bay, from Parang carollers at Christmas to a straw hat pulled low at a midnight roadblock — Trinidad is not backdrop here. It is a third heartbeat in the story.
From the Opening Page
“Take me home wit you.”
A suave, velvety voice she heard. She paused, and she turned her head towards the sound. Their eyes connected — instant recognition, instant remembrance from somewhere yet unknown to them both.
Where Is Home? — Chapter One
The Author
Katherine Mathura
Katherine Mathura writes from the same shifting, sun-soaked geography that fills the pages of Where Is Home? — a world of sugarcane villages, colonial bridges, and a Northern Range rising blue-green against an island sky. Her fiction moves the way her island speaks: in rhythm, in dialect, with reverence for the ordinary corners nobody else thought to look at.
Where Is Home? is her debut novel, a story of first love and belonging she has been carrying, and finally set free, for a long time.
Testimonials
Reviews From Readers
Have a look at what readers say about my books!
"I read this in two sittings and thought about it for a week after. Katy and Stewart's love felt inevitable and impossible at the same time — I haven't stopped hearing Stewart's voice."
Jennifer M.
READER
"Mathura writes Trinidad like it's a character with its own heartbeat. The sugarcane fields, the gardens, the Christmas parang — I was completely transported."
David H.
READER
"A first love story that doesn't flinch from how big and messy first love actually is. Lush, aching, and quietly devastating by the end."
Amanda S.
READER