Most Popular Books by Indira Ganesan

Characters leap off the pages and into our hearts. . . . Ganesan crafts her work with such a gracefully light touch that readers leave the book with the sense of having just experienced something exquisitely fine. -Joan Hinkemeyer, Rocky Mountain News Inheritance is a gracefully wrought novel centering on the emotional awakening of Sonil, a fifteen-year-old girl living with her aunts in India. Overcome by a lingering illness, she travels to the mythic island of Pi to recover under the care of her beloved grandmother. In this lush Arcadian space, boundaries between what is real and what is not diminish, and Sonil begins to discover who she is. Rejected by her emotionally distant mother and searching desperately for any information about her American father, she seeks solace in an affair with an American man twice her age. It is through that relationship of love and loss that she begins to understand and forgive her mother, realizing for the first time what she has inherited and what she must forge for herself.

After a decade in a suburban American world of shopping malls and fast-food restaurants, sisters Renu and Manx return to their childhood home, the island of Pi. A bit of India "torn free to float in the Bay of Bengal," its alien and yet strangely familiar landscape is defined by gardens and hillsides ablaze with surreal foliage, and ceiling fans that circle endlessly in the background. The sisters and their mother have returned because cousin Rajesh, always affectionately known as Renu''s twin, has died. His death and their return mark the beginning of a curious journey, leading by unexpected routes toward revelation.

A tale set on a gorgeous Indian Ocean island in a large family compound presided over by a stalwart matriarch imparts the stories of a marriage ceremony that ends with a pregnant widowed bride, cousins who follow family gossip to puzzle out an aunt''s story and a newly in-love woman who struggles with cultural and family identities. 25,000 first printing.