Breakaway Books

Authored by Nayantara Roy; Published November 2024; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

If you have gone no-contact with your parents, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you read this book. The Magnificent Ruins broke my heart in its stark recounting of generational trauma.

Lila is shaken from her Brooklyn-based, very American life by a call from her mother: Her grandfather has died, and he has left the Indian family home, currently the primary residence of a half-dozen relatives, to Lila. On the verge of a huge promotion at work, Lila nonetheless travels to Kolkata to attend her grandfather’s funeral and try to put the affairs of the house in order. What follows is the unraveling of generations of family pain and secrets, all anchored around the ownership of the ancient family home.

Despite having grown up in India, Lila feels very much the foreigner for much of her time in India. This perspective of the outsider is keenly painful at times, isolating Lila even from the family who greets her with effusive, warm verbal welcomes. But it’s Lila’s interactions with her mother that made my heart break the most: Clearly, mental illness has run rampant throughout the generations, resulting in emotional and physical abuse from grandmother to mother, and from mother to Lila. Lila’s attitude toward her mother, torn between resentment and deep affection, felt so real and also deeply uncomfortable; it felt like Lila was in an impossible situation. And truly, most of Lila’s connections with her family and even her childhood friends are like this—messy. This is not a story for those who like tidy romantic endings. But it is a story for those who want to witness a real, raw family that is nonetheless filled with love. Their expression of it is just a mile away from Lila’s extremely stable step-family in Connecticut.

India as a setting is—no surprise—enchanting. The glance into local politics was both fascinating and disturbingly familiar. But the backdrop of a full-blown Indian wedding and the renovation of a historic house is a delight for the imagination. As much as I did not want to be a member of Lila’s family, I would have loved to live in her neighborhood and bear witness to the beauty of the house. As Lila settles into life in India, it was nothing short of an adventure to immerse myself vicariously in the culture, enjoying the ways that India embraces over-the-top affection and sighing at the active rumor mill. 

The Magnificent Ruins is unquestionably beautiful—just use caution if picking it up will revive old family trauma.