Family secrets

Television executive Nayantara Roy’s debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins, has hit the shelves this week.

The fiction follows Lila, an editor in a prestigious publishing house in Brooklyn, New York.

As she is on the verge of a career breakthrough, the 29-year-old receives a life-changing call from her mother, informing her that she has inherited her family’s enormous ancestral home in Kolkata, India.

The sprawling estate reunites Lila with her mother, as well as the complicated legacy of her extended family which she thought she had left behind 16 years ago, as she also sees her grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time in ages.

“I sat down at a café, and what poured out of me was a story about a mother and daughter, and the secrets we harbour generation after generation,” Nayantara said in an interview.

“Those secrets turn into trauma. I didn’t even know I was holding onto those things I had learned about our ancestors, which is often how generational trauma works,” she added.

The Indian American author won the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award for her work, titled 8C in 2018. Her plays have been performed in India and the UK and she is currently writing her second novel titled Sisters Of A Halved Heart.