I am dizzy with joy to share that my debut novel, The Lights of Shantinagar will be launched in India on July 7!
The book came out in the UK in June 2025 amidst turbulent times. The original publisher Unbound went belly-up, having reneged on contracts and payments to hundreds of its authors1. The only way we authors survived this unprecedented ordeal was by coming together as a community - we helped each other through everything, from retrieving our files from the debris of bankruptcy, finding new publishers and agents and holding hands as we processed the nightmare in real time. After a few months of gruelling uncertainty, many of us mercifully found a new and stable home with a new publisher, Wilton Square Books2. They took over the mammoth task of rescuing hundreds of titles from the black hole of liquidation and restoring them back on bookshelves. I am fortunate to be able to put the past behind and look onwards and upwards. They collaborated with Penguin Random House to bring my book to India and I am thrilled and grateful beyond measure!
The Lights of Shantinagar is a story about many things. It is an inquiry into women and ambition - our own and the ones we inherit from our families. It is an exploration of love - generous to a fault, morally dubious. A wonderment of quantum physics and the true nature of reality. But above all, it is an acknowledgment of the ordinary - everyday life in small town India, which for the most part begins and ends with a cup of chai.
Reality is subjective. In the words of Anais Nin, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” Much of this book too, is about what the characters see, don’t see or choose to unsee. Shantinagar unfolds through the POVs of different characters, each illuminating a different facet of the story and in doing so, revealing parts of their own selves to us.
The metaphor of electrons and quantum physics quietly weaved its way through the narrative and characters. It took on a life of its own.
The book has received kind words from mentors, teachers and writers I love and admire:
Nidhi Arora is an incandescent writer. Sensory and meditative, her writing is infused with the gift of attention and illuminated with gentle insights. Nidhi is both a student and a master of the moment. The Lights of Shantinagar is intensely meditative and draws the reader into its own world, offering acceptance and insights that sparkle. Natasha Badhwar, author of My Daughters’ Mum
Wise and wonderfully observant, The Lights of Shantinagar illuminates the lives of women on the cusp of change. “We all make the choices we need to make,” asserts Nidhi Arora in her affecting, richly detailed debut. Hers is a quiet, transporting story of ambition and expectation, sisterhood and family, feminism and love - and particle physics! -and the power to dream beyond the status quo. Sara Lippmann, author of Jerks
Refreshing, emotionally aware, and astutely narrated, Nidhi Arora’s debut The Lights of Shantinagar flirts with quantum physics to (re)present the mechanics of everyday life in a hyperlocal setting that most South Asians will immediately identify with…By examining the power dynamics that exist within a family, the transactional bonds that one forges in society—sometimes out of necessity and often out of sheer boredom—and inspecting individual motivations (the parts) that thwart an assumed social order (the whole), Arora almost foretells the arrival of neoliberal sociality with profundity as if she were solving a mathematical problem with a familiar set of variables. Her prose possesses the quaintness of Anita Desai’s writing style and the sharp focus on middle-class travails that one can witness in Vivek Shanbhag’s fiction, yet, it is storytelling at its most novel. Saurabh Sharma (they/them/theirs), Delhi-based queer writer and cultural critic
I hope you will give it a read and I hope that you will enjoy it. If you do, please leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon.
Pre-order on Amazon now or buy it at a bookstore near you on the 7th of July!
Related reads:
Two years ago I wrote about the journey from pitching to acceptance and the rejections:
Decoding rejections
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June 14, 2024
Some time ago, which feels like a long time, ago, a cherished friendship ended. The usual story, a momentary miscommunication inflicted a hurt so quick and deep that months of attempts to mend failed to heal it, till it reached a point where my attempts to reconcile became hurtful and eventually, I had to let go. The friendship shrivelled and now lives…
Links to the gory details of last year:
The nightmare that was Unbound: https://www.thebookseller.com/comment/the-unbound-authors-view)
New beginnings: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-publisher-set-up-to-provide-a-safe-and-secure-home-for-unbound-authors
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