From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person—all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip's life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City...

Two women, living in America's heartland, unearth shocking secrets about the men they love and question the lives they chose. P is on deadline. She should be translating. Instead, she's writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. A literary translator in Arkansas (of all places), she's married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, P discovers a secret about her husband, one that upends her understanding of her life's trajectory. In the widening gulf between who she is and who she thought she might be, she imagines a double, someone very like her, but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun... Now we meet another "P": a novelist. She's married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It's a second marriage—her first fell apart when she came upon a secret concealed by her then-husband. This P is exhausted and enraged: by racial...

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 Canada, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao 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 an Air India flight from Vancouver, 2 suspects--finally--are on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in Canada, 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 caught in the undertow of the tragedy, and privy to their secrets. This...

"The Toss of a Lemon joins the company of the great novels on India." – Yann Martel *** In a fiction debut to rival The God of Small Things, Padma Viswanathan gives us a richly detailed and intimate vision of an India we've never seen. Inspired by her family history, Padma Viswanathan brings us deep inside the private lives of a Brahmin family as the subcontinent moves through sixty years of intense social and political change. At the novel's heart is Sivakami, a captivating girl-child married at ten to an astrologer and village healer who is drawn to her despite his horoscope, which foretells an early death-depending on how the stars align when their children are born. All is safe with their daughter's birth, but their second child, a son named Vairum, fulfills the prophecy: by eighteen, the child bride Sivakami is a widow with two young children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she must don the widow's white sari. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. She dutifully follows custom, except for one act of rebellion: she insists on a secular education for her troubled son. While her choice ensures that Vairum fulfills his promise in a modernizing India, it also sets Sivakami on a collision course with him. Vairum, fatherless in childhood, childless as an adult, rejects the caste identity that is his mother's mainstay, twisting their fates in fascinating and unbearable ways. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic and yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family's doorstep. It is also the debut of a major new voice in world fiction.