Katie Chase

Retro 4 is the latest collection of the best, the funniest, the strangest, and the most affecting stories from the award winning literary magazine, Joyland.

This bracing, intelligent debut tackles the strangeness of growing up, the joys and difficulties of breaking away from family, and our sometime absurd or downright dangerous rites of passage. The girls and women in these stories come up against the rules and roles that give shape to their worlds. As marriages are arranged over tea, blood feuds simmer beneath football games, and the rules of a city burn, they struggle between holding onto their families and seeking out new ways to live and love. These stories ask, as our hands slip from the long line of tradition and we become refugees from home, what, if anything, is lost. And how is that what we thought we'd let go keeps finding its way back?

When Rosie finds a beautiful silk picture frame decorated with a little princess sitting on an elephant, she is soon whisked away on another adventure - this time in India. But she can't find the little princess. She meets Suvita, who tells her that she lives with her uncle because her mother and father are dead and that she's definitely not a princess! Suvita tells Rosie about how, before Suvita was born, the maharajah's daughter went missing from the palace because she wanted to marry the man who she loved. The maharajah has been sad ever since. Then Suvita tells Rosie about the sari and poem that her mother gave her before she died. With the help of Suvita's friend, Anil, the girls go in search of the answer to the riddle left to Suvita by her mother. What they find out surprises them all!