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 microaggressions, by structural obstacles, by her husband's dubious responses to her ambitions. Then the pandemic falls and her new novel falters, along with everything else she (and everyone else) had planned. In this new stillness, though, she starts to see her marriage differently. And, unexpectedly, she begins an essay, about her favorite color: chartreuse.

The Charterhouse of Padma is full of delicious surprises, revelations, and sharply observed truths about what is to be brown, a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist. Exhilarating, electrifying, charged with incisive intellect and humor, this is a novel for anyone who ever wondered how, or if, they ever chose the thing they love.

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 child-hood 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 before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-hus-band's murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she'd like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma's research uncov-ered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters.

In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humour and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters' adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary page-turner that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.

Sivakami was married at ten, widowed at eighteen, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she puts on widow's whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste's rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami's son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family.

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 life, The Ever After 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 Air India Flight 182 from Vancouver, two suspects are--finally--on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in North America, 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 that remains unable to escape the undertow of the tragedy. As Ashwin finds himself less and less capable of providing the objective advice this particular family seeks, his surprising emotional connection to them pushes him to face his own losses. The Ever After imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.