The Author
Katherine Mathura
Writing the islands the way they actually feel — not the postcard, the pulse.
Biography
A voice shaped by sugarcane and sea air
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.
She is drawn to stories where love and place are inseparable — where a single garden, a single afternoon, a single voice can hold the weight of an entire lifetime. Her characters are dreamers hemmed in by small worlds, reaching for horizons they can feel long before they can name them.
Where Is Home? is her debut novel: a story of first love, identity, and belonging she carried for a long time before finally setting it free on the page.
In Her Words
“I didn't set out to write a love story. I set out to write a place. The love story is just what happened when I let two people walk through it.”
Katherine Mathura
Behind the Book
Where the story comes from
Where Is Home? is set in a 1970s sugarcane village much like the ones Katherine grew up around — where the East Indian community's history of indentureship still shapes daily life, and where a girl with a wandering imagination is never quite sure she is allowed to want more.
The novel took shape over years of returning, in memory, to that landscape: the Northern Range, the convent-school afternoons, the Christmas parang carollers going house to house. Katherine wanted to write Trinidad not as scenery, but as a force the characters have to reckon with — the same way they reckon with love, family, and each other.
Genre
Contemporary Literary Romance
Setting
1970s Trinidad — sugarcane country to the Northern Range
At Its Heart
First love, identity, and the question of where we belong
Debut Novel
Where Is Home?
Dedication