Padma Viswanathan

A sweeping, luminous saga of love, loss, caste, and resilience in colonial India. When ten-year-old Sivakami is married to a much older astrologer, her fate is sealed by tradition. By eighteen, she is widowed--her head is shaved and, according to Brahmin custom, she cannot touch or be touched, even by her young children, from dawn to dusk. But Sivakami refuses to vanish into ritual seclusion. With fierce determination, she returns to her husband's household to raise her two children, enlisting the help of Muchami, her loyal servant and silent partner in defiance. Spanning over sixty years and three generations, The Toss of a Lemon follows Sivakami's family as India transforms--from colonial rule to independence, from caste-ridden orthodoxy to modern upheaval. With every turn of history and heartbreak, the choices they make ripple outward, forever altering their legacy. Padma Viswanathan's acclaimed debut blends intimate storytelling with epic scope, exploring the bonds of family, the weight of tradition, and the quiet acts of rebellion that shape a life.

A masterwork about backcountry life by one of Brazil's most celebrated novelists. In 1941, a national literary poll in Brazil named Graciliano Ramos one of the country's ten greatest novelists--one of only four living authors on the list. His reputation has only increased there in the sixty years since his death. Brazilian readers fight over which of his novels is their favorite. Now St. Bernardo, his second-to-last novel, has been freshly translated for North American readers. This gritty, dryly funny book tells the story of Paulo Hon rio, a field hand who learns to read and write in jail, emerging with the ambition of buying and restoring to greatness the now-decrepit property where he was once a day laborer. St. Bernardo, named for his ranch, is the memoir of his rise and fall, written in his own rough-hewn voice. Flavored with subtle ironies and rich local idioms, St. Bernardo will appeal to readers of William Faulkner and Juan Rulfo, anyone who loves a tragicomic story of a striving outsider and self-made man, ruthless and tender in turns.

From internationally acclaimed New Face of Fiction author Padma Viswanathan, a stunning new work set among families of those who lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing, registering the unexpected reverberations of this tragedy in the lives of its survivors. A book of post-9/11 life, The Ever After demonstrates that violent politics are all-too-often homegrown in North America but ignored at our peril. In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of Air India Flight 182 from Vancouver, two suspects are--finally--on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in North America, comes back to do a "study of comparative grief," interviewing people who lost loved one in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had family members who died on the plane. Then, to his delight and fear, he becomes embroiled in the lives of one family that remains unable to escape the undertow of the tragedy. As Ashwin finds himself less and less capable of providing the objective advice this particular family seeks, his surprising emotional connection to them pushes him to face his own losses. The Ever After imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.

Sivakami was married at ten, widowed at eighteen, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she puts on widow's whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste's rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami's son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family.