Bijou Roy A Novel

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Bijou Roy’s life in Washington, D.C., is not thrilling but it is steady, anchored as it is in research work and the enchantments of a first love. When her father passes away following a long illness, however, this stability is tested. She leaves her premed career and her relationship in limbo, traveling to India to scatter her father’s remains–a rite traditionally performed by a son–in the river that runs through his native city of Kolkata. There, she meets Naveen, a history professor who happens to be the son of her father's closest comrade. Naveen holds over Bijou several intimate details about their fathers’ past, particularly their involvement with the Naxalites. As the truth of her father’s past is revealed, Bijou is swept up in the mysteries of love, grief, and family histories, questioning what happens next when everything she had taken for truth is suddenly up for grabs. Caught between two suitors, two countries, and with the weight of her grief still fresh, Bijou reels in the collision of past and present. But in her quest to understand her place in the world, she realizes how each generation must wrestle–often at great risk–with the one that came before, and, perhaps above all, learns how to replace sorrow with hope.About The Author Ronica Dhar is the author of Bijou Roy and was a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellow in Fiction. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan and teaches creative writing as well as English literature and composition. She is currently the Visiting Scholar at St. Louis University, and is working on her second novel, set in late 19th-century Kashmir. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri. More information is available at www.ronicadhar.com.