From the author of What the Body Remembers, an extraordinary story of love and espionage, cultural tension and displacement, inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan (code name “Madeleine”), who worked against the Occupation after the Nazi invasion of France.

When Noor Khan’s father, a teacher of mystical Sufism, dies, Noor is forced to bow, along with her mother, sister and brother, to her uncle’s religious literalism and ideas on feminine propriety. While at the Sorbonne, Noor falls in love with Armand, a Jewish musician. Though her uncle forbids her to see him, they continue meeting in secret.

When the Germans invade in 1940, Armand persuades Noor to leave him for her own safety. She flees with her family to England, but volunteers to serve in a special intelligence agency. She is trained as a radio operator for the group that, in Churchill’s words, will “set Europe ablaze” with acts of sabotage. She is then sent back to Occupied France. Unwavering courage is what Noor requires for her assignment and her deeply personal mission — to re-unite with Armand. As her talisman, she carries her grandmother’s gift, an heirloom tiger claw encased in gold.

The novel opens in December 1943. Noor has been imprisoned. She begins writing in secret, tracing the events that led to her capture. When Germany surrenders in 1945, her brother Kabir begins his search through the chaos of Europe’s Displaced Persons camps to find her.

In its portrayal of intolerance, The Tiger Claw eerily mirrors our own times, and progresses with moments of great beauty and white-knuckle tension towards a moving and astonishing denouement.

Excerpt from The Tiger Claw
December moved in, taking up residence with Noor in her cell, and freezing the radiator.

Cold coiled in the bowl of her pelvis, turning shiver to quake as she lay beneath her blanket on the cot. Above, snow drifted against the glass and bars. Shreds of thoughts, speculations, obsessions … some glue still held her fragments together.

The flap door clanged down.

“Herr Vogel…”

The rest, in rapid German, was senseless.

Silly hope reared inside; she reined it in.

The guard placed something on the thick, jutting tray, something invisible in the dingy half-light. Soup probably. She didn’t care.

She heard a clunk and a small swish.

Yes, she did.

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NOMINEE 2004 - Giller Prize

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The only true spy I've ever met (that I know of) is Gaston Vandermeersche, a leader in the Dutch underground in WWII. While Gaston was writing his memoir Gaston's War, he came across the story of Noor Inayat Khan. "An Indian princess was imprisoned by the Gestapo at the same time and place as I was," he told me. "Sure," I said. "Every Indian woman was an exotic houri or princess then, and a wizard programmer today." "Noor is different." he assured me. So in 2000, after the publication of What the Body Remembers, I read Madeleine, Jean Overton Fuller’s 1952 biography of Noor. It raised so many questions, I began reading other books about Noor, which only led to more questions, till I finally wrote my way to the possible answers through this novel about a Muslim secret agent in search of her Jewish beloved in WWII France.

I had questions like: who was the piano student Noor was reportedly engaged to for five years before they parted when the Germans invaded? Why did she need a stomach operation in the 30s? What did it mean to be the daughter of a man like Hazrat Inayat Khan who brought his version of Sufism to the West, a version preaching a Universal God unrecognizable to Islamists? And in a time when India was struggling for independence from the Raj, how did Noor, who came from so Indian a family, justify working for the Raj? Imagination could slip between the silences, and informed speculation could take over where non-fiction could not go. Noor herself captivated and fascinated me, though not for the same reasons as she has fascinated other writers. She made me wonder how did it feel to be a racially and culturally hybrid person during a war? What was it like to be the only Muslim woman among the fifty women in clandestine operations? What kind of survival skills would she have, being nourished by her faith in Allah, yet aware of her minority status as a colonial, a woman and a non-Christian?

WWII was covered in a chapter during my schooling in India. Though 2.5 million Indians had served, it wasn't considered India's war. But from my research for What the Body Remembers, the story of two women in a polygamous marriage in colonial India, I knew of the man-made famine Indians had suffered as a result of Churchill's policies, and of the suppression of dissent in India during the war. Churchill biographies are markedly silent about his famine policies which caused the deaths of 3.5 million people in India. It isn't top secret — anyone reading Nehru's most famous work of prison-writing "Discovery of India" will discover the famine in the first chapter. In 1943, Noor would have been as aware of that famine as any educated expatriate Indian.

I wondered if Noor would have thought of herself as an expatriate Indian or, being a second generation immigrant, would she have thought of herself as French? I decided she could be Indian and French. With an Indian father, she could also have thought of herself as English, and with an American mother, she might have thought of herself as American. Again, I decided she was both. Was she Muslim or Christian? From Hazrat Inayat Khan's teachings, I concluded she must have been both, and that exclusivity and single path solutions would have been foreign to her very being.

On I went, collecting books that mentioned Noor, immersing myself in accounts of London during the war, reading memoirs and other books about Occupied France in French and English. I read many fiction and non-fiction accounts of the double agent codenamed Gilbert who betrayed several resistance networks only days after Noor landed in France, and the radio game that misled the Gestapo about D-day. In biographies of her father, I found Noor mentioned in footnotes. The official History of the SOE mentioned another woman, in a footnote — Renée Garry. Writers who have written of Noor have mentioned but barely explored the connection between these two footnotes, these two women.

Reading accounts of other resistance agents, I began to feel each of them, not only Noor, deserved a book be written about their exploits. But Noor was treated differently. Why was she held at the Avenue Foch Gestapo HQ in Paris and not sent to a prison, work or death camp like any other Allied agent? Was she tortured? Raped? The accounts contradicted one another.

In India, I travelled to Baroda, now called Vadodara, to see Noor’s ancestral home and meet her family. I tried to understand her father’s message in relation to other preachers in the Sufi tradition. To understand Noor’s time in Europe better, I walked around Suresnes, the quaint little town outside Paris where she grew up, went to La Mosquée where she must have prayed. I sought out people who had lived in France during the war, and Muslims who could help me understand Sufism. I followed her route through England, France and Germany. Meeting people who had known and loved her, visiting apartments she used as safe houses, places from where she transmitted, and the prison where she was kept enchained for ten months. The biography said she made a daring escape attempt, but visiting 84 Avenue Foch in Paris, I doubted it. Nor am I convinced by the Gestapo Chief’s testimony in Noor’s personal files in the Public Records office.

An area I thought would be a tremendous challenge, understanding how people can slide into Fascism, was brought to me in real time in contemporary America. After the World Trade Center tragedy of 2001, people I knew began polarizing into pro- and anti-Bush factions, with Bush-supporters acquiescing under the excuse of “Security” to amazing violations of international law, the law of the land, as well as civil and human rights. Just as in the book, Noor searches for her beloved Armand Rivkin, who has been rounded up as a terrorist and locked away in a camp, some woman in Afghanistan waits and prays for news from Guantànamo Bay about her husband or lover. Just as Noor was trying to send her Armand a message in 1943, some woman is trying to reach her "enemy combatant" husband through the International Red Cross, hoping he is alive after two years in prison, hoping he has not been tortured. And just as the French said in the 1940s, “they must be black marketeers and terrorists,” many Americans in my day are saying the same of the 1100 nameless people rounded up after 9/11/01, and of 3000 people mentioned in Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union speech. I understand Fascism now — it is that time when the worst in us is glorified and rewarded by our leaders.

Noor challenged my preconceptions at every turn. A Muslim woman who received the George Cross for aiding in sabotage operations, a Muslim woman who received the Criox de Guerre for her bravery in facing and killing two German soldiers. Was she a terrorist or a valiant member of the resistance? It was a trompe d'oile where you consciously switch point of view so you can see either a vase or two faces in profile, but not both. And like that illusion flipping in and out of view, the picture is both: Noor is a terrorist in the eyes of the Germans, and a formidable member of the French resistance in the eyes of the Allies.

Other challenges: the second point of view character, Noor's brother Kabir — a pilot who, having bombed Germany during the war, turns to religion and becomes a Sufi pir like his father. And since I’m not a Muslim, I read widely and talked with many students of Sufism and Islam.

To write Noor's story, I had to create her opposite. Her captor Ernst Vogel — a Nazi. I had to understand his xenophobia, racism, and fears as Allied bombs rained down on his family in Germany. Other writers have humanized their Nazi characters by showing them with family. That was too facile. But Vogel became human when I realized he had a need we all have — to be loved. Though he himself had loved power so well he had become incapable of love for others. Sadly, we all know men and women like Vogel.

As I wrote, Noor taught me each of us is presented a choice at every moment, to acquiesce or resist, to be faithful to the values of love and justice or to compromise our principles for the sake of comfort and advancement. Writing her story acted in a strange way to teach me hope, and the importance of holding on to it. Seeing through her eyes reminds me often that it’s a blessing we cannot see the future. Reading about amazing acts of resistance, I learned that even in a total war against empathy like the one waged in Nazi Germany, not everyone succumbed. The Nazis could not outlaw kindness, concern and compassion. Activists, concerned Americans, writers and others who protest show me the same is true in our times.

Advance readers say The Tiger Claw is a novel about fidelity and betrayal, others say it’s a love story, others that it is about the birth of hope in an era of darkness. To many, The Tiger Claw offers up parallels with a history to which the world, including the USA, proclaimed, “Never Again.” For me, the story is about the triumph of love and hope over forces that try to kill our compassion, our humanity. About love beyond physical existence. As this book goes to press in 2004, I trust you will come to love Noor, Renée, Kabir, Vogel and all the other characters in The Tiger Claw as much as I have.

Shauna Singh Baldwin
May 2004

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“Baldwin’s luminous prose captures the reader’s attention. . . . [She] immerses the reader in the atmosphere of the Vichy era, replete with undercurrents of terror and prejudice. . . . Readers, especially those interested in history and politics, will be intrigued by this gripping, richly textured novel penned by a consummate storyteller.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Baldwin has succeeded in crafting yet another indelible story based in fact.”
—The Edmonton Journal

“The Tiger Claw brilliantly reveals the shifting sands of allegiance in times of war and the duplicity required for survival when all who are operating underground are interdependent but no one can be trusted fully.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

“The Tiger Claw is a brilliant novel, a harrowing story of espionage and love, of loyalty and betrayal in the treacherous world of WWII Europe. Shauna Singh Baldwin has an astonishing ability to paint a very large canvas with amazing detail. You are there. ‘Impressive’ hardly even begins to describe it: masterful. I could not put it down. A stunning achievement, but most of all, important.”
—Sandra Gulland

“A deeply felt, richly evocative novel that resurrects and reinvents a remarkable life, The Tiger Claw tells an affecting story of love and loss amidst the turbulence of war and human dislocation. It confirms Shauna Singh Baldwin as a major literary voice that transcends the borders that divide human experience.”
—Shashi Tharoor

“The Tiger Claw is a fascinating story of moral complexity, inner conflict and exile, a magnificent portrait of a very courageous woman, Noor Inayat Khan, the legendary French Resistance fighter, whose divided conscience is reflected in the drama of Nazi-occupied France and British-occupied India. That Noor strikes us a modern figure of heroism and doubt is because of the compelling vision of Shauna Singh Baldwin.”
—Marie-Claire Blais

Praise for What the Body Remembers:
“A stunning first novel. Intensely atmospheric — an artistic triumph.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An impressive achievement. . .rich, fascinating, epic. . . An original, extremely readable book that dramatizes the plight of Indian women with great sympathy and love.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

“A captivating jewel of a novel by a seasoned and sophisticated writer. . . Beyond being a compelling tale of individuals, What the Body Remembers offers a gimlet-eyed view of a pluralistic society’s disintegration into factionalism and anarchy.”
—The Washington Post

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Listen to an interview with the author

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Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal and grew up in India. She is the author of English Lessons and Other Stories and What The Body Remembers. She is also the coauthor of A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America. Her short fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in literary magazines in the U.S.A., Canada, and India. From 1991-1994 she was an independent radio producer, hosting "Sunno!" the East-Indian-American radio show where you don't have to be East-Indian to listen.

Shauna holds an M.B.A. from Marquette University. Her first novel, What the Body Remembers, was published in 1999. It has been translated into eleven languages, and was awarded the 2000 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Canada/Caribbean region.

Shauna's awards include India's international Nehru Award (gold medal) for public speaking, and the national Shastri Award, a silver medal for English prose. She is the recipient of the 1995 Writer's Union of Canada Award for short prose and the 1997 Canadian Literary Award. English Lessons received the 1996 Friends of American Writers Award.

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