Secret Daughter

Secret Daughter

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Literature & Fiction

Somer's life is everything she imagined it would be — she's newly married and has started her career as a physician in San Francisco — until she makes the devastating discovery she never will be able to have children. The same year in India, a poor mother makes the heartbreaking choice to save her newborn daughter's life by giving her away. It is a decision that will haunt Kavita for the rest of her life, and cause a ripple effect that travels across the world and back again. Asha, adopted out of a Mumbai orphanage, is the child that binds the destinies of these two women. We follow both families, invisibly connected until Asha's journey of self-discovery leads her back to India. Compulsively readable and deeply touching, SECRET DAUGHTER is a story of the unforeseen ways in which our choices and families affect our lives, and the indelible power of love in all its many forms.
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The Golden Son

The Golden Son

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Literature & Fiction

The first of his family to go to college, Anil Patel, the golden son, carries the weight of tradition and his family’s expectations when he leaves his tiny Indian village to begin a medical residency in Dallas, Texas, at one of the busiest and most competitive hospitals in America. When his father dies, Anil becomes the de facto head of the Patel household and inherits the mantle of arbiter for all of the village’s disputes. But he is uneasy with the custom, uncertain that he has the wisdom and courage demonstrated by his father and grandfather. His doubts are compounded by the difficulties he discovers in adjusting to a new culture and a new job, challenges that will shake his confidence in himself and his abilities. Back home in India, Anil’s closest childhood friend, Leena, struggles to adapt to her demanding new husband and relatives. Arranged by her parents, the marriage shatters Leena’s romantic hopes and eventually forces her to make a desperate choice that will hold drastic repercussions for herself and her family. Though Anil and Leena struggle to come to terms with their identities thousands of miles apart, their lives eventually intersect once more—changing them both and the people they love forever.
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A Great Country

A Great Country

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Literature & Fiction

Named an ELLE BEST BOOK OF 2024Named a BEST or MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR by Readers' Digest, Elle Magazine, CondeNast Traveler, Publishers' Weekly, Indigo, ZibbyMag, Goodreads, BookBub & more "A deeply moving, layered portrait of the hopes, dreams and fears a family carries as 'other' in the face of the modern American Dream." — Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push and The WhispersPacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are...
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The Shape of Family

The Shape of Family

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Literature & Fiction

A deeply moving story of a multi-cultural family in California: Indian mother Jaya, American father Keith, daughter Karina and son Prem. When the family is struck by tragedy, it tears the family apart, creating rifts and catapulting each off on their own journey. Thirteen-year-old Karina is left to her own devices. Blaming herself and desperate to escape the despair that hangs like a black cloud over her childhood home, she seeks her own ways to cope until she leaves for college. But on campus, instead of liberation, she finds only loneliness and must grapple with painful experiences that send her to the edge of a breakdown. In her desperation, she joins a community garden where she seeks comfort and friendship amongst a group of young people with utopian ideals, led by the charismatic Micah. Fragile and alone, Karina is drawn to him and to the group's philosophy of living off the land. They invite her to live with them at their house called The Sanctuary and it seems...
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