Cambridge educated, Calcutta-origin Pia Gosh-Roy, recipient of the 2017 Hamlin Garlnad Award and the 2019 Cagibi Macaron Prize, worked in advertising as a copy writer for over a decade before turning to fiction.  And I Am the Arrow is compulsive saga of three generations of women live in an art deco-style mansion in Calcutta that is clinging on to traces of grandeur, and the ghost of a man cut in two on a train track, spanning Calcutta, London and New York. Grandmother Niyoti, daughter-in-law Ira and granddaughter Mishu have been stalled by grief since Rathin, their adored son, husband and father, died under the wheels of train.

Rathin is gaily chatting from an afterlife where he can commune himself with Woolf, Primo Levi and Plath. Niyoti lies in a coma, still commenting internally on what’s going on around her although to the onlooker she seems unresponsive. Long-nursed secrets are prised out, as the servant, Bani makes the biggest revelation as Ghosh-Roy weaves recent history into a striking tale of abuse and survival. Chatterjee Mansion a 1940s art-deco house in Calcutta with floors of polished marble and rooms filled with lies and omissions. In this house, late on a rain-soaked night, the turn of a single key unlocks a story that throws its women on a journey across the worlds of the living and the dead, and shatters all they know to be true.

Families are quite important as they mould us, cage us, define us, free us and even death can’t break the familial bond. 

And I Am the Arrow by Pia Ghosh-Roy, The Indigo Press £12.99.