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A luminous debut novel—the story of a friendship between a young schoolgirl and an aging professor—that follows them over the years and gives us an intimate look at a Catholic community in a Bombay fishing village.
In Varuna, a devout Catholic fishing community in Bombay, life centers around Our Lady of the Navigators, the local church. The fishing boats go out for a catch; with luck, they return with a full boat, though sometimes they do not return at all. It is a town driven by church and sea, sea and church.
Francis Almeida and young Celia D'Mello meet one day when she cuts school. Celia has lost one of her shoes and can't go to her strict Catholic school in sandals, but is too afraid to tell her parents they'll need to buy her new ones; Francis—a retired history professor who is slowly becoming senile—accidentally runs into her with his bicycle. This accident binds these two families together in unexpected ways.
We follow them, and their community, over the years through domestic changes, births, deaths, and political upheaval, in a novel that depicts love, loss, and family bonds, as well as a subtly devastating portrayal of the way AIDS infiltrated marriages, and the stigmas it carried with it. More than a decade in the making, with indelible characters, this novel is a beautiful invitation into a close-knit world.
"That's just so, but her characters endure as best they can, and mostly with admirable dignity. Steeped in tragedy, but beautifully, memorably, and soulfully told." —Kirkus Reviews
"A heartwarming and lively story wrapped up in an ode to one of the world's most vibrant cities." —Booklist
"What a beautifully formed novel. With its changing portraits of two families in a Catholic fishing village outside Mumbai, The Unbroken Coast does what the best fiction does—it is utterly particular and utterly large. And I could not put it down." —Joan Silber, author of Improvement and Mercy
"The Unbroken Coast is a beguiling epic about a Catholic community in Mumbai grappling with the treacheries of progress and the inexorable march of time. Illness devastates the novel's humble, endearing protagonist, who bravely crosses class boundaries in her enthralling search for peace. Readers will find a home in Jones's razor-sharp portraits of family life." —Hirsh Sawhney, author of South Haven
This information about The Unbroken Coast was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nalini Jones is the author of a story collection, What You Call Winter, and the recipient of an NEA fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story and Guernica, among others. She currently teaches in the Columbia University MFA Writing program and has previously taught writing and literature at Yale University and the Arcadia Center in Greece.
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