With this spellbinding first novel about the destructive lies three immigrant generations of a Pakistani/Bangladeshi family tell each other, Roopa Farooki adds a fresh new voice to the company of Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri and Arudhati Roy.
Henna Rub is a precocious teenager whose wheeler-dealer father never misses a business opportunity and whose sumptuous Calcutta marriage to wealthy romantic Ricky-Rashid Karim is achieved by an audacious network of lies. Ricky will learn the truth about his seductive bride, but the way is already paved for a future of double lives and...

"It's time to stop fighting, and go home." Those were the words, written by a minor but well-reputed Bengali poet, that finally persuaded Aruna Ahmed Jones to exit her ground-floor Victorian flat wearing only jeans and a t-shirt, carrying nothing more substantial than a handbag, and keep on walking. Leaving behind the handsome Dr. Patrick Jones, her husband of less than a year, Aruna heads to Heathrow, where she boards a plane bound for Singapore, and her old life. When Aruna left for London, she was fleeing many things: her recently deceased father, the only family she'd ever had; her...

The Murphy family has never tried to be different; they just are. When Yasmin, the youngest sibling, was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, her older siblings learned to adapt to less attention and more responsibility, to a sister with "special abilities" that no one, not even they, could ever truly understand. Since the deaths of their parents, the three siblings have become adults in their unique, tragic ways. Asif, the responsible oldest brother, has been left to take care of Yasmin by their middle sister Lila, the stubbornly rebellious beauty who resents Yasmin for her emotional...