2024 debut author! Roy is a master storyteller with believably super-flawed characters right out of the gate. I will be breathlessly waiting for her next book!

“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

“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 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

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