"I almost fell out of bed laughing."
-–Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians
“What Kevin Kwan did for rich people problems, Diksha Basu does for trying-to-be-rich-people problems.”
--People
A People Pick
Entertainment Weekly's Must-List
A TIME Magazine Pick
Rolling Stone's Culture Index Pick
One of Esquire's Best 30 Books of 2017
A heartfelt comedy of manners, Diksha Basu’s debut novel unfolds the story of a family discovering what it means to “make it” in modern India.
For the past thirty years, Mr. and Mrs. Jha's lives have been defined by cramped spaces, cut corners, gossipy neighbors, and the small dramas of stolen yoga pants and stale marriages. They thought they'd settled comfortably into their golden years, pleased with their son’s acceptance into an American business school. But then Mr. Jha comes into an enormous and unexpected sum of money, and moves his wife from their housing complex in East Delhi to the super-rich side of town, where he becomes eager to fit in as a man of status: skinny ties, hired guards, shoe-polishing machines, and all.
The move sets off a chain of events that rock their neighbors, their marriage, and their son, who is struggling to keep a lid on his romantic dilemmas and slipping grades, and brings unintended consequences, ultimately forcing the Jha family to reckon with what really matters. Hilarious and wise, The Windfall illuminates with warmth and charm the precariousness of social status, the fragility of pride, and, above all, the human drive to build and share a home. Even the rich, it turns out, need to belong somewhere.
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"Money - who has it, how it's spent, what it buys, what it can't, what true value is, all of that - drives Diksha Basu's endearing, astute debut novel, The Windfall....Breezily entertaining enough to enthrall droves of this summer's beach and poolside readers, The Windfall also manages to seamlessly insert urgent, relevant themes of gender inequity, socioeconomic prejudice and aggression, familial expectations and constrictions, isolation, entitlement, and more.
—
Christian Science Monitor