Savia Viegas’s debut novel Tales from the Attic (2007) brought to life the fascinating but fast vanishing world of a Catholic community in South Goa. The novella’s protagonist Mari is in an operation theatre for hysterectomy. In the process of losing consciousness under the care of an impatient anesthetist, she reminisces about her childhood in a village in Salcete where every one ‘had the same surname and shared a blood kinship and had big empty houses. Empty because an entire generation of adults had not married, or the young people had emigrated to Europe or simply because the couple in the house could not bear children’ …’ (p. 5). In Let me Tell You About Quinta, Viegas reemploys the motif of the ancestral home to chronicle the lives of three generations of the Portuguese speaking ‘bhatkar’ (landed) family of the Viegases. Their sprawling, albeit dilapidated, pretwentieth century mansion called ‘Quinta’ is one of the last remaining icons of a feudal way of life. We are forewarned however that this is not a tale of entitlement by the opening lines of the narrative: ‘So you see, This is how it ends. The pride of big houses’ (p. 1). While still presenting a grand façade on the exterior, the crumbling interior spaces convey a sense of sadness and desolation, aggravated by ageing, decay and death. Viegas uses a non-linear timeframe to present an intergenerational perspective on the family’s history. The wide canvas of characters with Portuguese sounding names may at first present some confusion, but we soon work out a who’s who with the aid of the family tree prefixed to the narrative. Despite their quirks and eccentricities, Viegas draws on our compassion for the dilemma of her ageing characters whose pre-liberation world is on the verge of extinction. We have the family matriarch Mariquinha Viegas who ruthlessly struggles to keep Quinta within the family, and her brother Tish Ximaeo who outlives most of his immediate kin, and surveys the changing landscape of Carmona with despair and helplessness. Mariquinha’s youngest son Queirozito (Tito) finally wins his claim to the house after a protracted legal battle, and inherits a twenty room termite infested palatial mansion. He is married to Preciosa who struggles to maintain a semblance of the life style from the past. Their daughter Mari, ...