The Lights of Shantinagar: Unbound Firsts 2025

'Incandescent' Natasha Badhwar, author of My Daughters' Mum The Lights of Shantinagar is a warm and lively portrait of family life set in modern India where new philosophies are reshaping old traditions and one woman’s astute observations can change everything. Aspiring quantum physicist Sumi is newly married and has moved into her husband’s family home. Here she observes that the beguilingly tranquil middle-class town of Shantinagar is not very different from her beloved quantum world: the happenings in one house are cryptically entangled with things next door, objects mysteriously disappear and unexpected interactions reveal surprising truths. As the line between right and wrong begins to blur, new discoveries force the residents of Shantinagar to reflect on what they truly know about themselves and the ones they love. Meanwhile, Sumi must blend logic with love to make sense of her new circumstances. 'Storytelling at its most novel' Saurabh Sharma, queer writer and cultural critic 'Vivid, engaging and truthful' Shelley Weiner, acclaimed novelist and journalist 'Illuminates the lives of women on the cusp of change' Sara Lippmann, author of Jerks 'An eloquent new voice' Zahra Barri, author of Daughters of the Nile

About the Author :
Nidhi Arora has lived in India, Singapore and now London, but she far prefers to inhabit the world of words. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies including Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Out of Print, Sonder, The Aleph Review, The Hooghly Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Litro, Pluto and Tinkle. The Lights of Shantinagar is her first novel.

Review :
'Refreshing, emotionally aware and astutely narrated, Nidhi Arora’s debut The Lights of Shantinagar flirts with quantum physics to (re)present the mechanics of everyday life in a hyperlocal setting that most South Asians will immediately identify with. By examining the power dynamics that exist within a family, the transactional bonds that one forges in society – sometimes out of necessity and often out of sheer boredom – and inspecting individual motivations (the parts) that thwart an assumed social order (the whole), Arora almost foretells the arrival of neoliberal sociality with profundity as if she were solving a mathematical problem with a familiar set of variables. The constants in this equation, however, turn out to be the traditional notions that continue to inform life in India but as they lose their grip over a new, aspirational generation, a transition is made visible, signalling its inherent capacity to hold duality, which comes through in miraculous ways in Arora’s wondrous novel. Her prose possesses the quaintness of Anita Desai’s writing style and the sharp focus on middle-class travails that one can witness in Vivek Shanbhag’s fiction, yet, it is storytelling at its most novel' Saurabh Sharma (they/them/theirs), Delhi-based queer writer and cultural critic 'Wise and wonderfully observant, The Lights of Shantinagar illuminates the lives of women on the cusp of change. "We all make the choices we need to make," asserts Nidhi Arora in her affecting, richly detailed debut. Hers is a quiet, transporting story of ambition and expectation, sisterhood and family, feminism and love – and particle physics! – and the power to dream beyond the status quo' Sara Lippmann, author of Jerks