Description

When the Sanyal matriarch Bipasha Devi turns ninety, four generations gather at the family home on Carmichael Road in Kolkata — a sprawling, peeling South-facing mansion that has watched the city rename itself three times. There is Bipasha herself, sharp-tongued and unforgiving, who arrived as a fifteen-year-old bride in 1949. Her widowed daughter Mridula, who gave up a singing career and never quite forgave anyone for it. Her granddaughter Antara, a divorce lawyer in Delhi who has not visited in eight years. And her great-granddaughter Ira, sixteen, who has just discovered that the family WhatsApp group is hiding an entire human being.

Over one long Durga Puja week, as the dhaak begins outside and the cook quietly burns the luchis, the four women begin to excavate the things their family has buried under good manners and better silver. A lover who was sent away. A pregnancy that was not a pregnancy. A brother who chose Pakistan. A daughter who was told she had died at birth.

Spanning from pre-Partition Dhaka to present-day Kolkata, *The House on Carmichael Road* is a sumptuous, devastating saga of Bengali womanhood — of the marriages women endured, the desires they swallowed, and the daughters who, generation by generation, learned to swallow a little less.

A novel that will be passed from mother to daughter for years.