In our book Painter and Patron, about the Códice Casanatense, an album of annotated Luso-Indian watercolors produced in Goa ca 1540, my co-author Juan José Morales and I noted that the both the paintings and annotations indicated both considerable and rather granular knowledge of the people and places all over Asia, Persia, Arabia and East Africa, as well as familiarity with descriptions in Portuguese sources as yet not formally published at the time. How this happened, we could only guess; Jorge Flores’s Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World, although it deals with a period from a few decades to a century and a half later, helps explain what was going on.

Belonging—either to another person, a family or a nation—is the key theme of this exquisite coming-of-age novel from British-Asian writer Selma Carvalho. Carvalho has published three non-fiction books which document the Goan migration to colonial East Africa. Her intimate understanding of the diasporic experience shines through every page as she explores her characters’ search for “home”.