The novel has also been discussed by Amy McGuff Skinner in her 2007 Ph. D. dissertation "Intimate Terror: Gender, Domesticity, and Violence in Irish and Indian Novels of Partition". Here Deane is quoted as saying: "What we misleadingly call ordinary life is destroyed by politics in our part of the world, generation after generation. I had to show how that happens." (p. 161) and further: "There's no talking cure, no implication that by revealing everything you will somehow overcome it". (p. 176)