I first learned about Secret Daughter when I read somewhere that it had sold more copies worldwide than Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Any book boasting that stat has to be worth a read!
In Shilpi Somaya Gowda's beautiful and impressive first novel, two completely disparate women are bound by a daughter named Asha. Kavita, Asha's birth mother, lives in rural India and surrenders her infant daughter to an orphanage in order to save her from infanticide. Somer, Asha's adoptive mother, is a pediatrician in San Francisco desperate to fulfill her maternal longing.
Secret Daughter follows the lives of Kavita, Somer and Asha over 20 years, chronicling inter-personal conflicts, cultural expectations, parental sacrifice and the never ending struggle to define "family." The characters are extremely complex; each grapples with regret, fear and sorrow while also showing a capacity for hope, courage, joy and forgiveness. Ultimately, Gowda gives a voice to the universal human search for identity and belonging admitting, in Asha's words: "Everything's more complicated than it seems."
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