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Devi S. Laskar presents CIRCA at Flyleaf Books
June 9, 2022 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Visit the Flyleaf Books event page to order your book, and please indicate in the comments if you’d like 1-2 seats held for you at the event!
For fans of The Burning Girl by Claire Messud and Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi, a stunning, gut-punch of a novel that follows a young Indian American woman who, in the wake of tragedy, must navigate her family’s expectations as she grapples with a complicated love and loss.
On the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, Heera and her best friends, siblings Marie and Marco, are teasing the fun out of life in Raleigh, North Carolina, committing rebellious acts of teenage delinquency. They paint the town’s water towers with red anarchy symbols and hang out at the local bus station to pickpocket money for their Great Escape to New York. But no matter how much Heera defies her strict upbringing, she’s always avoided any real danger—until one devastating night changes everything.
In its wake, Marco reinvents himself as Crash and spends his days womanizing and burning through a string of jobs. Meanwhile, Heera’s dream to go to college in New York is upended by a family illness, and she eventually finds herself trapped in an arranged marriage. Over the years, Heera’s and Crash’s paths cross and recross on a journey of dreams, desires, jealousies, and betrayals.
Heart-wrenching, darkly funny, and buoyed by gorgeous prose, Circa is at once an irresistible love story and a portrait of a young woman torn between duty and her own survival, between what’s expected of her and what she desires.
Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for the best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a 2019 book “All Georgians Should Read,” finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, long-listed for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature and the Golden Poppy Award. The novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019 and has garnered praise in Booklist, Chicago Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere.
