The Magnificent Ruins

June 1, 2024

Lila travels back to India from the United States when she inherits her huge ancestral home--which is still filled with her relatives, who resent her return. Layered upon her home coming, she navigates romance, faces a lawsuit, and deals with deep conflict, past and present. Playwright and short story writer Roy (author of the prize-winning "8C") debuts as a novelist. Prepub Alert.

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September 9, 2024
Roy debuts with an overstuffed family drama about a surprise inheritance. On book editor Lila De’s 29th birthday in 2015, her maternal grandfather dies and she inherits the sprawling family home in Kolkata, which is currently occupied by her mother and members of her extended family. Despite earning a promotion after her employer is bought by a conglomerate, Lila returns from Brooklyn to India for the first time in a decade. While navigating her volatile relatives’, as well as pressures from her new bosses to return to the U.S., she starts making repairs to the palatial house. She also reconnects with Adil, her now-married teenage boyfriend, and stumbles into an affair. The surprise arrival of author Seth Schwartz, with whom she’s carried on a casual sexual relationship, complicates matters. Roy has a knack for immersive descriptions, but the pace drags as the plot becomes cluttered with legal drama (Lila’s family files a lawsuit contesting her grandfather’s will), a steady stream of construction snafus, and the excavation of generational trauma. It’s a case of an author biting off more than she can chew. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

September 15, 2024
Lila De's life in Brooklyn is a success, but a bereavement that pulls her back to her homeland of India forces her to confront her demons. Twenty-nine-year-old Lila is understandably saddened to hear of her grandfather's death in India, the country she left at age 16. But she's also shocked to learn she has inherited his enormous, historic, decaying mansion, still inhabited by generations of the Lahiri family, including her volatile, sometimes toxic mother, Maya, who divorced Lila's father when she was an infant. Although just promoted to co-editorial director by the new management of her employer, a Manhattan-based publishing house, and involved in a relationship with a writer named Seth, Lila must return to Kolkata for eight weeks to attend the funeral and sort out her inheritance. Back in India, she is quickly swallowed up by family, responsibility, and memories, rediscovering her complex feelings toward Maya, whom she describes as "beautiful and fragile and cruel in the way children can be." Then there's Adil, her teenage love, still irresistible but now married. Soon, however, they are lovers. While seeming at first a novel about binary choices--New York or Kolkata, work or family, Adil or Seth--over (considerable) time this book's core reveals itself to be darker and different, which helps explain the wariness and unpredictability that often characterize Lila's responses. The narrative is long, and Roy doesn't always seem in control of her pacing or able to keep all her plates spinning simultaneously, as the story widens to embrace legal shenanigans, national politics, and a family wedding. The book's somber heart remains unrevealed until very late, arriving finally in a rush and a disconcerting shift of gears and narrative perspectives. Afterward, Roy works to restore order but more neatly than plausibly. A rich but shape-shifting, imperfectly synthesized family saga.

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November 1, 2024
At the age of 16, Lila left her mother's home in Kolkata, India to live with her father, stepmother, and half-siblings in Connecticut. Now 29, she is living on her own in Brooklyn and working as the editor at a small publishing house undergoing big changes with a new owner. After rarely speaking to her mother or the extended Lahiri family, Lila is surprised to inherit the five-floor ancestral home, plus a trust fund. Facing many opinions on what she should do, Lila is forced to confront a lifetime of struggling to belong in both her past and present worlds, and within her extended and blended families. The navigation of complex family relationships filled with decades of unacknowledged trauma, and the work required to face those unresolved issues, brings depth to the characters; the challenge of working within India's unfamiliar legal system creates tension. However, it's the rich details of Indian daily life, from food to music to politics, that will inspire readers to explore Lila's world further. This strong debut novel should be savored slowly and may appeal to fans of Thrity Umrigar or Kate Morton.

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