A young woman from India feels the pull from Lady Liberty’s lifted torch in New York Harbour and crosses the globe to make a new life, although she knows the path won’t be straightforward but also that the Big Apple is the place to support and nurture her dreams. Kay Sohini, raised in the suburbs of Kolkata and given an English education, reading Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion and Alison Bechdel and dreamt always of New York. When she finally moved to the city, leaving behind an abusive relationship. Sohini refuses to look away from the city’s flaws, from the damage its ruthless metamorphoses can inflict. Sohini, an immigrant, a survivor, a writer, a foodie, and, ultimately, an optimist – who rebuilds her life in New York City while recovering from the trauma of an abusive relationship. Both heartbreaking and uplifting, she explores the relationship between trauma and truth, displacement and belonging, and what it means to forge a life of one’s own. On her first night in New York, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK airport making an inventory of all she’s left behind in India, like the Hollywood film Terminal. Kay realises two things: She finally made it to the city that made her in celluloid and prose from across the Pacific – and that trauma she’s endured in her relation has left gaping holes in her memory.

Once in New York, Kay has a room to begin the work of piecing herself together through art and food. But as her personal story becomes a window onto a mystifying metropolis both inhospitable and inspiring to the many who call it home, Kay embarks on an electric exploration of how to forge the self and a life of one’s own today.

The Beautiful, Ridiculous City is another ode to New York but a phenomenal meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love with places – and indeed people- that do not always love us back but somehow still save us in weird, unexpected ways.

In the days before the inauguration of the 47^th President of United States some of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have made their way to the city – which has a legal obligation to provide shelter to anyone who asks – have begun to flee , fearing Donald Trump’s threatened deportations.  Mayor Eric Adams’ chaotic administration  with the mayor himself under federal indictment and with many of his top officials having resigned amid a torrent of investigations which has not helped matters.

Yet the city that never sleeps has survived plenty worse, and Sohini’s This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, describing gloriously, with drawings of the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, and Gimbels Sky bridge, offering a reminder that Sohini is one of a long line of women who have found themselves in the city, made their mark, remade themselves.  She absolutely loves New York for “the stories it is a home to, the creativity it lends to passers-by when the mind is desolate.  It is all about drawing pleasure from proximity. To possibilities, to art, architecture, culture, history, luxury.”

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City: A Graphic Memoir by Kay Sohini, Jonathan Cape £20, 128 pages.