In her insightful, multilayered debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins, playwright and television executive Nayantara Roy turns her storytelling skills to a new form: the intergenerational family saga. Set in the wealthy Ballygunge neighborhood of Kolkata, Roy's narrative unfurls the story of the wealthy Lahiri family through the eyes of its American granddaughter and reluctant heiress, Lila De.
As the book opens, Lila has just been promoted after a wealthy entrepreneur has bought the small publishing house where she's a rising-star editor. In the same week, Lila learns her grandfather has died and left her the family's massive, elegant, decaying mansion--much to the chagrin of her twin great-uncles, Rana and Hari; her beautiful and difficult mother, Maya; and other assorted relatives, most of whom live in the house. Lila takes a leave and returns to Kolkata, attempting to navigate the tangled legalities and emotions surrounding her inheritance and her family's opinions about it.
Roy expertly portrays Lila's ambivalence about both the house and her mother's family: she loves them, and they her, but her Americanness clashes with their more traditional family dynamics. As well, she's the outsider suddenly forced to make decisions affecting a group of people who literally live on top of one another. To further complicate matters, Lila's cousin Biddy is weeks away from getting married, and Lila's family eventually decides to bring a lawsuit challenging her right to own and manage the house. Meanwhile, Lila's mother proves as maddening as ever in her attempts alternately to ply her daughter with food and push her away with sharp words.
When Seth, one of Lila's authors and her sometime lover, shows up unexpectedly in Kolkata, Lila is forced to confront her two worlds side by side: the family and culture that both grounds and frustrates her, and the fast-paced, modern but isolating New York world she has left. Staying in her father's apartment, which has been redecorated by her kind white stepmother, further highlights Lila's liminal state of being caught between her worlds. As she spends more time with her family, Lila eases back into comfort with them, but also starts to notice troubling patterns, most of them relating to her great-uncle Hari's behavior. As Biddy's wedding and the end of Lila's leave draw nearer, Lila must decide how to move forward: not only whether and how to manage the house, but what she wants to make of the life she left behind in Brooklyn.
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. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams
Shelf Talker: Nayantara Roy's gorgeous, multilayered debut novel delves into the tangled secrets and legalities of a multigenerational family in modern-day Kolkata.