In this "rare feast" of a novel, a young Indian American book editor inherits her estranged family’s ancestral home–and their long-buried secrets (Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait With Boy). It is the summer of 2015, and Lila De is on the verge of a breakthrough in her career at a prestigious New York publishing house. But when she gets a call from her mother in India, informing her that she’s inherited her family’s sprawling estate, she must confront the legacy of an extended family that she thought she left behind sixteen years ago.
Returning to Kolkata reunites Lila with her mother after a decade of estrangement, and then there are her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom still live in the house, all of whom resent her sudden inheritance. To make matters more complicated, her first boyfriend seeks her out when she arrives, and her star author—and occasional lover—is suddenly determined to make things serious.
As Lila tries to come to terms with both past and present, long-suppressed secrets from her family emerge, culminating in an act of shocking violence, and she must finally reckon with her inherited custom of keeping everything under the surface.
Wise, witty, and deeply moving, The Magnificent Ruins is an utterly addictive read and a stunning debut.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Returning to Kolkata reunites Lila with her mother after a decade of estrangement, and then there are her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom still live in the house, all of whom resent her sudden inheritance. To make matters more complicated, her first boyfriend seeks her out when she arrives, and her star author—and occasional lover—is suddenly determined to make things serious.
As Lila tries to come to terms with both past and present, long-suppressed secrets from her family emerge, culminating in an act of shocking violence, and she must finally reckon with her inherited custom of keeping everything under the surface.
Wise, witty, and deeply moving, The Magnificent Ruins is an utterly addictive read and a stunning debut.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Shakespearean in scope and cinematic in vision, The Magnificent Ruins is a rare feast of a novel about the power, burden, and gift of inheritances both concrete and intangible. I read it with hunger - absorbed by Lila De's story, invested in her family's dynamics, and craving complete immersion in the colors, flavors, and politics of the complex Kolkata they call home - and finished it utterly satisfied. Nayantara Roy writes as her heroine lives: with courage and devotion, intelligence and skill." - Rachel Lyon
"The Magnificent Ruins utterly transported me to the Lahiri family's Kolkata. I felt as though I were occupying a room in their house, bearing witness to its fading glory, the political unrest beyond its gates and - most vividly - the tangle of relatives whose complicated love is at the heart of the story. Nayantara Roy brings these characters to life with such humanity and conviction that I believed they were real, and I missed them intensely when I reached the end." - Sheila Sundar
"The Magnificent Ruins gripped me from the first page and moved me to tears on the last. A wise, beautiful and haunting story about difficult mothers and daughters, the complications of family life, and redefining the meaning of home, this novel will stay close to my heart for a long, long time to come." - Thrity Umrigar
"As gorgeous as it is wise, Roy's voice soars and whispers with uncanny insight and wit, transporting us across continents, charting not only the distance between Calcutta and New York, but the stranger more mysterious abyss between childhood and adulthood, between family and home, between daughter and mother, and perhaps between life as we want it to be and life as it is--messy, complicated, beautiful, and sad. A page-turning, heart-rending family epic, this is a wickedly smart novel with an incredible generosity for characters and readers, and one that that eschews easy villains and easy answers and asks - how do we love one another across the entangled loyalties of geography and time? The answer will surely enlarge your life, and keep you reading long into the night. Quite simply one of the best novels I've ever read about what it means to call two places home." - Sunil Yapa
"The Magnificent Ruins utterly transported me to the Lahiri family's Kolkata. I felt as though I were occupying a room in their house, bearing witness to its fading glory, the political unrest beyond its gates and - most vividly - the tangle of relatives whose complicated love is at the heart of the story. Nayantara Roy brings these characters to life with such humanity and conviction that I believed they were real, and I missed them intensely when I reached the end." - Sheila Sundar
"The Magnificent Ruins gripped me from the first page and moved me to tears on the last. A wise, beautiful and haunting story about difficult mothers and daughters, the complications of family life, and redefining the meaning of home, this novel will stay close to my heart for a long, long time to come." - Thrity Umrigar
"As gorgeous as it is wise, Roy's voice soars and whispers with uncanny insight and wit, transporting us across continents, charting not only the distance between Calcutta and New York, but the stranger more mysterious abyss between childhood and adulthood, between family and home, between daughter and mother, and perhaps between life as we want it to be and life as it is--messy, complicated, beautiful, and sad. A page-turning, heart-rending family epic, this is a wickedly smart novel with an incredible generosity for characters and readers, and one that that eschews easy villains and easy answers and asks - how do we love one another across the entangled loyalties of geography and time? The answer will surely enlarge your life, and keep you reading long into the night. Quite simply one of the best novels I've ever read about what it means to call two places home." - Sunil Yapa
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