Nandini Bhattacharya Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Nandini Bhattacharya is a literary fiction novelist best known for her debut novel “Love’s Garden.” Bhattacharya was born and brought up in India though she has called the US her second home for the past three decades. Wherever she has been living, she has always turned to reading and books to find answers for the small and big questions in life. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and publications including “Ozone Park Journal,” “Meat for Tea: the Valley Review,” “OyeDrum,” “Storyscape Journal,” “The Bangalore Review,” “The Bacon Review,” and “Raising Mothers” among many others. Just like many authors, she has been attending writer conferences and workshops for many years. She has been a Craigardan Writers resident, held residencies at the VONA and Vermont Studio Center, and also been an attendee of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop. She made the finals for the 2019 Reynolds-Price International Women’s Literary Award, the longlist for the 2019 and 2020 Disquiet International Literary Prize, the finals for the 2018 Fourth River Folio Contest for Prose Prize, and came in second at the 2017-2018 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest.

Bhattacharya is a professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is an expert in Transnationalism, Postcolonial Studies, Film Studies, Colonial Discourse Analysis, Gender Theory, and South Asia Studies. Nandini is also an affiliate for Film Studies Programs, Africana Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies. She is also the director and founder of the South Asia Working Group that is a department of the Humanities Center at her university. Between 2012-2014, she worked at the English department as the Graduate Director. Before that, she had been working at the University of Toledo where she had been women and Gender Studies department chair. She has published and taught on postcolonial and colonial discourse, film, visual culture, and feminism, analysis of literature starting in the eighteenth century, travel writing, world literature, and gender in South Asia. After more than three decades in service in the US academe, education, writing, and teaching, she is interested in pursuing other interests. Some of these include freelance journalism, non-profit sectors, education administration, education consulting, and creative writing.

Nandini Bhattacharya recently began writing prose fiction and has several short stories published and made her debut in novel writing with “Love’s Garden” in 2020. The novel is a work of historical fiction inspired by the events of the Second World War. The novel is set in India and draws from the many events that shaped the history of Calcutta in particular and the British Empire in India in general. She also talks about the diversity and romance surround the court of the British Raj, Indian Independence, political drama, the Partition of India, and the lives of women caught up in the political drama, forbidden love, and romance. Since she published her debut novel, she embarked on a second work that focuses on the themes of xenophobic mentalities, love, Hindutva politics in India, racism, minorities, and other aspects of the Donald Trump administration in a novel titled “Homeland Blues.” She finds inspiration from others who have paved the way before her. Some of her biggest inspirations include Chimamanda Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Megha Majumdar, Salman Rushdie, and Amitav Ghosh. She currently lives with her family and their two cats in Houston.

“Love’s Garden” by Nandini Bhattacharya is a novel set in the latter part of the 19th century in an Indian subcontinent under British rule. India’s women are ruled by Indian men as well as British masters. It is at this time that a desperate widow in her twenties trying to save herself from too great a dishonor sacrifices her firstborn child. She decides to get married to a stranger but her action is a Faustian bargain that causes much damage to her second family. What follows is an unexpected atonement, bizarre relationships in love and politics that span the Indian independence movement and two world wars. Through her actions, she held her offspring heal from the deep wounds of her private history. The story shows the unbreakable spirit, resilience, and strength of daughters and mothers which allows them to navigate through unimaginable oppression in a country scarred by the machinations of a dying British Empire in India.