Description

Anaya Banerjee arrives in Bombay at twenty-five, from a comfortable Salt Lake middle-class Calcutta upbringing, with an English Literature MA from Jadavpur, ₹62,000 in savings, and the kind of ambition you cannot, at her age, yet name out loud. Within four months she has landed a junior copywriter role at a Lower Parel agency. Within a year, she is sharing a 1BHK in Khar West with two flatmates and an unwelcome aunt of a cockroach. Within three years, she is the senior copywriter on the biggest fashion brand campaign of 2024 — and quietly, urgently, beginning to drown.

*Sone ki Chidiya* — *the golden bird*, the name the world once gave India for its promise of wealth — is, in Devyani Pathak’s electric Bombay novel, the secret name an entire generation of small-town Indian women have been using, half-bitterly, for the city to which they came in their twenties to be remade.

Across four taut, gorgeously written years in Anaya’s life, the novel tracks the precise contemporary anatomy of urban Indian aspiration. The ₹38,000-a-month PG. The Bumble date who turns out to be married. The boss who is brilliant and also, slowly, demolishing her. The Calcutta mother who is calling every Sunday and being lied to. The first time Anaya looks at her bank balance on a Sunday morning and realises that, even now, she cannot, financially, leave.

Sharp, sensual, painfully recognisable, *Sone ki Chidiya* is the great young-woman-in-Bombay novel of our moment — for readers of *Megha Majumdar* and *Avni Doshi*.

A debut to read, share, argue about, and remember.