A NOVEL · OUT OCTOBER 14
Small Gods of Bombay
A family keeps a shrine on their balcony for a god no temple remembers. Three generations later, nobody can agree on whether to take it down — the debut novel from Devika Shah.
A NOVEL · OUT OCTOBER 14
A family keeps a shrine on their balcony for a god no temple remembers. Three generations later, nobody can agree on whether to take it down — the debut novel from Devika Shah.
When Kamini inherits her grandmother's flat in a crumbling Parsi colony, she also inherits the small brass shrine on the balcony — and the god nobody in the family can name. Her mother wants it gone before the building society complains. Her aunt wants it moved to the family's real temple, four hundred kilometres away. Kamini, an atheist by every reasonable definition, finds she cannot bring herself to touch it.
Small Gods of Bombay moves between 1958 and the present, following the god's unlikely arrival in the family and the granddaughter who has to decide what, if anything, she owes it.
— the opening line of Small Gods of Bombay
“Shah writes a joint family the way it actually sounds — everyone talking over everyone, and somehow you can hear every single one of them clearly.”
Kiran Desai Sharma
author of The Monsoon Table
“A ghost story that never once raises its voice. I read the last fifty pages twice, once for the plot and once to figure out how she did it.”
The Bombay Review
starred review
“Funny in the exact places grief usually forbids you to be funny.”
Nilufer Batliwala
author of Salt Water Colony
Devika Shah grew up in a Parsi colony in South Bombay and now lives in Pune. Her short fiction has appeared in three anthologies nobody bought outside of family obligation. Small Gods of Bombay is her first novel.
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