Now available: Standard of Care 

Amanda Patterson has talent, ambition, and a thinking disorder. When she drives away to take her place in the NYC art world, her family realizes that she is off her psychotropic drugs. As her sister and brothers frantically try to bring her to safety, she refuses one lifeline after another, crashes a car and buys a gun. In her hallucinated world of bridegrooms and warlocks, Amanda’s madness peaks, and she is committed to a long term facility.  She returns home with a new brutal personality, and her sister Clara catches her abusing their mother. Once her violent nature is revealed, her relationship with the family unravels. Turning from them, she becomes involved with Richard, whose psychopathic features mirror her own. He manipulates her obsessions and takes control of her by degrees—until Amanda realizes he is not so much a man as a delusion embodying her disease. They fight, and Amanda shoots him, which means she shoots herself. She does not die, but in the aftermath, the community’s perception of her does, holding a mirror to the fickle truth, the slipperiness of reality, and the urge to deceive.

Also available: Bombay Trilogy

Bombay Trilogy is the embodiment of three novels: Shiva’s Arms, Rescuing Ranu, and Kalpavriksha, weaving them into a sprawling epic that follows four generations of the Sambashivan family. The volume opens with the future matriarch Shiva, aged six, shooting a bandit who threatens her home. As she goes through time, protecting the family becomes her dharma-- unfortunately for her son Ramesh’s American wife, the fragile Alice. Not only does Shiva refuse to accept the outsider as a daughter, but she disowns her natural daughter Nela for bringing shame into the family with the rumor of an unsanctioned romance. Nela makes the ostracism work for her, fully exploiting her freedom, achieving academic success, and falling in love with Jackson. They marry and adopt an orphan named Ranu, saving the child from a forced marriage, and giving Jackson a new vocation─ to fight the trafficking of child-brides. The work takes him away from his new family and lands him in prison, and Nela must use her unexpected wealth from an invention to negotiate his release. She still has not been able to buy his freedom by the time the extended family meets again for another relative’s marriage ceremony, years later. She is, however, able to reconnect with her brother Ramesh, and help him rescue his student Anand from an episode of caste-related abuse by police, while their kinsmen revel in the ostentatious wedding. Against a backdrop of historical tumult and changing values, the question of what constitutes a family, and what do we owe it, hangs in the air, as Bombay Trilogy evolves into an exploration of cultural identity, personal choice, and the meaning of home.