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KEYA DAS'S SECOND ACT
By: Sopan Deb
Simon & Schuster
July 2023
On Sale: July 18, 2023
Featuring: Shantanu Das; Chaitali
288 pages
ISBN: 1982185481
EAN: 9781982185480
Kindle: B09JPJ56FN
Trade Paperback / e-Book
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Hardcover (July 2022)
LGBTQ | Fiction Family Life
A “painfully beautiful” (Booklist), heartwarming, and charmingly funny debut novel about how a discovered box in the attic leads one Bengali American family down a path toward understanding the importance of family, even when splintered.
Shantanu Das is living in the shadows of his past. In his fifties, he finds himself isolated from his traditional Bengali community after a devastating divorce from his wife, Chaitali; he hasn’t spoken to his older daughter, Mitali, in months. Years before, when his younger daughter, Keya, came out as gay, no one in the Das family could find the words they needed. As each worked up the courage to say sorry, fate intervened: Keya was killed in a car crash.
So, when Shantanu finds an unfinished play Keya and her girlfriend had been writing, Mitali approaches the family with a wild idea: What if they were to put it on? It would be a way to honor Keya and finally apologize. Here, it seems, are the words that have escaped them over and over again.
Set in the vibrant world of Bengalis in the New Jersey suburbs, this “delightful” (Diksha Basu, author of The Windfall) debut novel is both poignant and, at times, a surprisingly hilarious testament to the unexpected ways we build family and find love, old and new.
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