Nishita Parekh Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Nishita Parekh is an Indian American novelist best known for her debut novel The Night of the Storm which she published in 2024. Parekh was born and brought up in Mumbai India but at some point, she moved to the United States. She now makes her home in Texas where she lives with her husband and child. She is a writer by heart, even though she works a day job as a software programmer. A product of two continents, she loves to write about her experiences as an immigrant living in the United States in addition to her experiences as a woman. Parekh is also active in the writing community and is a member of Sisters in Crime, Crime Writers in Color, and the International Thriller Writers. She is also a one-time winner of the RevPit contest.

The inspiration for Nishita Parekh’s debut novel came to her sometime in 2017. In August 2017, she was living in Houston Texas when the state was hit by Hurricane Harvey, one of the most severe hurricanes in recent memory. Her second-story apartment became the place where most of her family found refuge, with many brought in by rescuers on boats after their homes got flooded. For the better part of two days, they hunkered down as the massive storm dropped record amounts of rain and left much of Houston without electricity. She loved spending time with her nephew and niece who ran up and down her tiny apartment, but the most important thing that happened was the planting of a seed in her mind. It was then that Parekh had the idea of a locked room mystery. It was a story in which the lead characters with some dark secrets are trapped in an apartment by a devastating hurricane.

At the time Nishita Parekh was writing The Night of the Storm, she did not have a child and hence she used her friends with children as a reference. However, by the time she published the work, she had a three-month-old baby. Parekh wrote through much of her early parenthood days, which she has asserted was one of the hardest things she ever had to do. Nonetheless, those nights spent without sleep made it easier for her to be excellent in how she showcased the tiredness and exhaustion her lead character Jia felt, since she experienced it firsthand. She could also write eloquently about the bond between the children and their mother, since she was experiencing the same thing with her child.

By the time Nishita Parekh published her novel, she had been working on it for half a decade. It was while she was pregnant, she submitted her work to several agents and then did it again once she gave birth to her child. She would then forget about publishing and even writing for a while as she was too busy with parenting. But things changed one night when she was relaxing with her child and saw her inbox flicker and on opening it, she found that she had an offer from an agent. It was just one of many offers that she would receive but she ultimately decided to go with Lori Galvin. After about a month of submissions, the book was sold at auction and was published in 2024.

Nishita Parekh’s novel The Night of the Storm is a very intriguing locked-room mystery thriller. The work features an Indian American family trapped in a house with a killer during Hurricane Harvey. Houston is about to be hit by a massive hurricane and Jia Shah a single mother who lives in the city not having the best of weeks. Ishaan her twelve-year-old son was recently suspended from school after he got into a fight. She is still dealing with the aftereffects of her divorce, the disapproval of her family, her move to Houston, struggling to make ends meet as a single mother and now has to worry about her son’s future too. But things get even worse when she learns that her complex is one of those that have to be evacuated. Jia moves in with Seema her sister in Sugar Land, as she believes it is the best place to stay safe. Since her philandering ex has been watching her every move, she cannot afford to make a mistake as she could just lose her son. Things get interesting when her sister’s in-laws show up too resulting in rising tensions and soon enough, someone is dead. With no help until morning, Jia needs to do everything in her power to keep her son safe and find the killer, or else she will go down for a crime she did not commit.