Works
Love's Garden, a novel, by Nandini Bhattacharya
One of BUZZFEED News' "15 Books From Smaller Presses You Won't Be Able to Put Down!"
"A fascinating and well-crafted journey into India's complex past with characters that will entice you...." Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (The Last Queen, The Forest of Enchantment)
"Wonderfully dense and wise, with a narrative sweep recalling the work of Dickens...." Laura Brown (Quickening, featured in Barnes and Noble's Discover New Writers Series)
"A sprawling family saga set against some of the most momentous events of 20th century Indian history." Clifford Garstang (What the Zhang Boys Know, winner of 2013 Library of Virginia Award)
RATED 4.5 ***** BY AMAZON READERS
Love's Garden, a novel
There is NOTHING Lady Prem Mitter, unhappy wife of Indian baronet Sir Mitter in Calcutta in the 1920s, won't do to protect the abandoned daughter of her dead childhood friend. When she's asked to step in to protect the child of an Englishwoman with a mysterious connection to her husband, though, can she cope?
Diverse stories of family and women's lives in modern India ruled by the British unearth an older secret in Lady Mitter's past, a secret that holds the key to her life and loves during the most turbulent times in British-ruled India.
"Rowans, Oaks, and Other Trees," Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021 (forthcoming 2021)
"Something Blue," (excerpt from novel-in-progress Homeland Blues), in Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology, Flowersong Press, 2021
LOVE'S GARDEN, A NOVEL
It is 1898. India is ruled by the British, and India's women are ruled by British masters as well as Indian men. A desperate young widow makes a tragic sacrifice to save herself from ultimate dishonor. She marries a stranger for security and shelter, but her damaged second family pays dearly for this Faustian bargain. Then, an extraordinary atonement and strange liaisons in politics and love — spanning the two world wars and the Indian independence movement — help her descendants heal from this traumatic private history. Love's Garden demonstrates the strength, resilience, and unbreakable spirit of mothers and daughters navigating layers of oppression, all while the sun is not-so-peacefully setting on British India.
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