The Magnificent Ruins

By: Nayantara Roy

Narrated by: Deepa Samuel

Lila De is on the verge of a career breakthrough when she gets a call from her mother in Kolkata, informing her that she’s inherited her family’s sprawling estate–so she returns home after a decade with no contact. Her extended family isn’t so easy to win over, and to make matters worse, Lila is caught between her old boyfriend and her occasional lover–her star author–who suddenly wants to define the relationship.

As Lila come to terms with both past and present, suppressed family secrets emerge, culminating in a shocking act of violence. Lila has no choice but to finally address her family’s inherited custom of keeping everything under the surface.

Perfect for fans of Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane and All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, The Magnificent Ruins is an unforgettable novel about the millennial immigrant experience and the desire for belonging.

©2024 Nayantara Roy (P)2024 Algonquin Books

Critic reviews

“The Magnificent Ruins gripped me from the first page and moved me to tears on the last. A wise, beautiful and haunting story about difficult mothers and daughters, the complications of family life, and redefining the meaning of home, this novel will stay close to my heart for a long, long time to come.”—Thrity Umrigar, bestselling author of Honor and The Museum of Failures

“As gorgeous as it is wise, Roy's voice soars and whispers with uncanny insight and wit, transporting us across continents, charting not only the distance between Calcutta and New York, but the stranger more mysterious abyss between childhood and adulthood, between family and home, between daughter and mother, and perhaps between life as we want it to be and life as it is--messy, complicated, beautiful, and sad. A page-turning, heart-rending family epic, this is a wickedly smart novel with an incredible generosity for characters and readers, and one that that eschews easy villains and easy answers and asks - how do we love one another across the entangled loyalties of geography and time? The answer will surely enlarge your life, and keep you reading long into the night. Quite simply one of the best novels I've ever read about what it means to call two places home.”—Sunil Yapa, author of Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

“The Magnificent Ruins utterly transported me to the Lahiri family’s Kolkata. I felt as though I were occupying a room in their house, bearing witness to its fading glory, the political unrest beyond its gates and—most vividly—the tangle of relatives whose complicated love is at the heart of the story. Nayantara Roy brings these characters to life with such humanity and conviction that I believed they were real, and I missed them intensely when I reached the end.” —Sheila Sundar, author of Habitations

"Shakespearean in scope and cinematic in vision, The Magnificent Ruins is a rare feast of a novel about the power, burden, and gift of inheritances both concrete and intangible. I read it with hunger—absorbed by Lila De's story, invested in her family's dynamics, and craving complete immersion in the colors, flavors, and politics of the complex Kolkata they call home—and finished it utterly satisfied. Nayantara Roy writes as her heroine lives: with courage and devotion, intelligence and skill."—Rachel Lyon, author of Fruit of the Dead and Self-Portrait with Boy