VIRTUAL - Nandini Bhattacharya - LOVE'S GARDEN

This event will take place on ZOOM. Click here to register.

Nandini Bhattacharya will be in conversation with Indira Ganesan. 

LOVE'S GARDEN is set in 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.

Nandini Bhattacharya was born and raised in India and has called the United States her second continent for the last thirty years. Wherever she has lived, she has generally turned to books for answers to life's big and small questions. Her short stories have been published in Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, The Bacon Review, The Bangalore Review, OyeDrum, and Ozone Park Journal. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop and held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, VONA, and Craigardan Writers Residency (forthcoming). She was first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), a finalist for the Fourth River Folio Contest for Prose Prize (2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and a finalist for the Reynolds-Price International Women's Literary Award (2019). Love's Garden, a work of WWII historical fiction is her first novel and draws on major events surrounding the British Empire in India and especially Calcutta (Kolkata), Indian Independence, the Partition of India, and the lives of Indian women caught up in forbidden love, political drama, and the romance of diversity surrounding the Jewel in the Crown of the British Raj. She is currently working on a second work of literary fiction about love, minorities, racism, and Hindutva politics in India and xenophobic mentalities and other mysteries in Donald Trump's America, titled Homeland Blues. She is an ardent admirer of Jhumpa Lahiri, Megha Majumdar, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, and last but not least, Chimamanda Adichie. She lives outside Houston with her family and two marmalade cats.

Indira Ganesan has written three critically acclaimed novels published by Alfred A. Knopf: The Journey , Inheritance, and As Sweet As Honey. Paperbacks and translations have appeared from other houses, including Vintage Books and Beacon Press.  Her fellowships include The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College,  the W.K.Rose Fellowship, The Fine Arts Work Center, and the Paden Institute for Writers of Color. A regional finalist for Granta’s first Best America and Novels Under Forty campaign, her work has been selected as a Barnes and Noble Notable Book, and been on noted fiction lists. In addition to writing fiction, she reviews books for The Key Reporter, teaches at Emerson College part-time, and is a program host on WOMR-FM Community Radio in Provincetown.