New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction 2024
Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2024
Named a Most Anticipated/Recommended Book of the Season by the Los Angeles Times, People.com, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Alta Journal, The Week, AV Club, Zibby Owens, and more.
“So many of Roy’s pages are a love letter to Kolkata…her writing truly shines”—New York Times Book Review
“Roy’s roomy novel draws us deep into the way family history is inscribed on buildings. With The Magnificent Ruins, she proves herself a daring architect, taking full advantage of this sprawling plot to explore a family shaken to its foundation… I’m smitten… Eight thousand miles doesn’t feel so far away when we’re traveling with a writer this inviting.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Roy’s powerhouse debut centers on a fabulous decaying mansion…If you love a family epic set in India (the food! The melodrama!), this one’s for you.” —People.com, Best Books of November 2024
“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, bestselling author of Honor and The Museum of Failures
“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, author of Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
“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, author of Habitations
"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, author of Fruit of the Dead and Self-Portrait with Boy
“The Magnificent Ruins is beautifully written [and] poignant”—Washington Independent Review of Books
"A deliciously long book, The Magnificent Ruins is riveting from its first page to its last."—BookPage
"Sharp-eyed and vividly detailed, Roy's debut explores secrets, shifting identities, the clash between tradition and modernity, and the overwhelming gravitational pull of family."—Shelf Awareness
2024-08-17
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.
