At twenty-nine, Lila is a rising-star book editor in Brooklyn when she learns that she has inherited her family’s enormous ancestral home in Kolkata—along with the secrets that lie within— in this sweeping multigenerational debut.
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 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.
For fans of Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes and All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, The Magnificent Ruins is an utterly addictive read.
