A compulsive saga of three generations of women and the ghost of a man cut in two on a train track, spanning Calcutta, London and New York.
Chatterjee Mansion is a 1940s art-deco house in Calcutta with floors of polished marble and rooms filled with lies and omissions. In this house, late on a rain-soaked night, the turn of a single key unlocks a story that throws its women on a journey across the worlds of the living and the dead, and shatters all they know to be true.
And I Am The Arrow is a kaleidoscopic tale of flight and survival, of forbidden love and wasted ambition, and secrets that hide in plain sight. Trying to make sense of this world is Mishu, a young woman recently returned to India, just as Niyoti, her grandmother and the family matriarch, falls into a coma. As Mishu, her mother Ira, and their servant Bani wait to see if Niyoti wakes or leaves them forever, long-buried truths come to the surface, revealing a rich and dramatic story of India’s social and political struggles entwined with the family’s gains and sacrifices.
Narrated by the women and the ghost who haunts them all, And I Am The Arrow is an exploration of death and grief, of memory and reality, and of the ways we love and bruise each other.
Praise
‘A gripping intergenerational story of wide compass and deep compassion. I enjoyed it enormously.‘
— Jo Baker, author of The Midnight News and Longbourn
‘A brilliant, beautiful novel that swells with heart. I adored this rich, lyrical, linguistically playful, intergenerational story that spans decades, countries and cultures. The prose ducks and dives as past secrets spill into the present and the dead haunt the living with their wit and wisdom. A deeply-felt exploration of history and humanity, I loved every page of this voice-driven, propulsive novel. Remarkable! Ghosh-Roy’s characters – both the living and the dead – will haunt long after the last line.’
— Rupert Dastur, author of Cloudless
‘And I Am The Arrow by Pia Ghosh-Roy, is a stunning debut novel exploring severed selves and the myriad ways we can hold one another close. The intricately layered chapters build a poly-vocal mosaic that reveals secrets and intimacies, drawing us in and keeping the pages turning. Ghosh-Roy’s prose, deftly moving between the playful and poetic, bristles with keen observations on life, death, and the spaces in between. I was so deeply invested in the characters (and furious, at times, with some of them). What an achievement, what a story.’
— Melissa Fu, author of Peach Blossom Spring
‘Set in old Calcutta, London, and New York, this intense intergenerational saga is told in many voices with passion and sparkling wit, as well as the foreboding of tragedy and the ghosts of the past.‘
— Namita Gokhale, author of Paro and Jaipur Journals
‘A stunning and propulsive debut full of plot twists and family secrets, Pia Ghosh-Roy’s And I Am the Arrow plunges its readers deep into the troubled psyches of its main characters and makes us fall in love with each one. Her finely tuned yet playful and risk-taking writing style is both witty and heartbreaking. In the vividly imagined Chatterjee Mansion in Calcutta, Ghosh-Roy walks a delicate balance between old-time storytelling and wild modernity, while exploring complex subjects with nuance, grace, and deep understanding of the human condition.‘
— Maureen Langloss, Editor-in-Chief, Split Lip Magazine
‘Elegant and expansive, Ghosh-Roy excavates the fault lines of family life with great sensitivity and grace.‘
— Mahesh Rao, author of The Smoke is Rising and Half Light
‘To read this book is to feel as alive as a ghost, seeing, noticing, smelling, hearing lives that a jaded world renders subsonic. This is a desperately life-loving novel. I’ll read it again, now.‘
— Sumana Roy, author of How I Became a Tree
