Description

Ishita Kapoor, twenty-nine, is six months away from a wedding her mother has been planning since she was seventeen. The boy is suitable. The lehenga is ordered. The Pinterest board has been printed and laminated. And then, on a humid August evening at a friend’s terrace party in Defence Colony, she meets Zoya — a thirty-three-year-old documentary filmmaker with a sharp laugh, a half-empty glass of red wine, and absolutely no business being this interesting.

What begins as long voice notes at 2 a.m. — the kind Ishita has never sent to her fiancé — becomes coffee in Khan Market, then dinner in Hauz Khas, then a weekend in Kasol that neither of them tells anyone about. Ishita has never thought of herself as the kind of woman this happens to. That, she will discover, is exactly the kind of woman this happens to.

Set against a Delhi of rooftop bars and arranged meetings, of Punjabi mothers who love fiercely and listen selectively, of cousins who already know and aunts who must never, *Things We Cannot Tell Our Mothers* is a tender, fiercely honest novel about the love we are not supposed to want — and the courage it takes, in our families, to name it anyway.

For every reader who has ever loved someone they couldn’t bring home.