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The Magnificent Ruins

Nayantara Roy

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE

WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE WORK OF FICTION 2024

A sudden call from her mother in India interrupts the summer of 2015 for Lila De. A books editor in Brooklyn, New York, on the brink of success, Lila learns she has inherited her family's sprawling, timeworn estate in Kolkata – a lineage she had decisively abandoned sixteen years ago.

Her return to the city hurls her into a fraught reunion with her mother and into the volatile gravity of her extended family: a difficult grandmother, opinionated aunts, mercurial uncles and resentful cousins, all still entrenched in the ancestral mansion and none pleased by her sudden inheritance. As though the emotional terrain were not treacherous enough, her first love resurfaces the moment she arrives, while her celebrated author, also her recurrent beau, suddenly insists on redefining their relationship. Caught between the life she painstakingly built and the one she fled, Lila begins to sense long-buried family secrets coming undone.

Written with uncommon brio and verve, The Magnificent Ruins is masterful storytelling by one of the most exciting voices of our times.

Nayantara Roy

NAYANTARA ROY is the author of The Magnificent Ruins, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice novel of 2024, an LA Times Editor's Pick, a Washington Post Best Book, a People Magazine Best Book, an Apple Books best debut, and a Hachette book club pick, amongst others. The book is currently being adapted for television by Universal Television. Her second novel, Sisters of a Halved Heart, is forthcoming from Little, Brown on 2 June 2026. In 2018, Roy won the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award for '8C’. Her plays have been performed in the UK and India. By day, she is the Senior Vice President of Television at Sandbox Entertainment, where she acquires and develops original scripted series. Her television career has included overseeing shows such as Normal People, Nine Perfect Strangers, Mary & George, The Hunting Wives and Outlander, among others. Originally from India, she lives in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA.