The Magnificent Ruins

• Author: Nayantara Roy
• Genre: Literary Fiction
• Publication Date: November 12, 2024
• Publisher: Algonquin Books

Thank you to Algonquin Books for sending me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Lila De is on the verge of a breakthrough in her career at a New York publishing house when she learns that her grandfather has left the family estate to her. But returning to Kolkata, she realizes that her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins all resent her sudden inheritance. To make matters more complicated, her first boyfriend seeks her out, and her star author—and occasional lover—is suddenly determined to make things serious. As long suppressed secrets from her family emerge, culminating in an act of violence, Lila finds herself reckoning with her past and present.

Wise, witty, and deeply moving, The Magnificent Ruins is a heartrending story about the complexities of love and the wealth of secrets in one large and magnetic family.

I was offered an ARC of this book when the paperbacks came out, and I am so glad that I accepted. There are certain time periods, places, and events that I am always drawn to reading about, and books about or set in India always grab my attention. I’ve read some really amazing books, and this was no exception.

This sprawling family saga crosses continents and generations, and it is delightfully messy. Things are going really well for Lila De, as she’s about to rise to a new level in her chosen career. Honestly, her job sounds ideal, and I wish I would have known about that as an option when I was going to college. She reads submissions to the publisher, and has a talent for finding drafts with a lot of potential, then works to edit them into a masterpiece. She’s become very friendly with her star author, who she hooks up with on a casual basis. 

However, just as her publishing house is upsizing and she’s gunning for a major promotion, she learns that her beloved grandfather had passed away, and left the family estate in Kolkata to her alone. The house is a five-story structure, and it shelters most of her family—her widowed grandmother, her mother, two uncles, a lot of aunties, and some cousins. Understandably, they are furious that the estate was left solely to Lila, and she knows that she needs to take an extended amount of time away from work to handle this issue, yet at the same time, she’s worried about the impact this time off might have on her upcoming promotion. Side note: the new boss, Malcolm Aetos, gives off some serious Elon Musk-esque vibes, but less racist and more fun.

Lila is a complicated character, and she was given room to both engage in some self-discovery, and coming to some hard truths allows her the opportunity to grow throughout the book. In the span of time leading up to her grandfather’s death and over the eight weeks of her trip, Lila also learns more about the dysfunctional dynamics within her maternal family and some long-held and new secrets about the family. She has a very strained and difficult relationship with her mother, Maya, who she lived with in the family estate in Kolkata until she was 16, and then she moved to the United States to live with her father and stepmother.

The family dynamics were fascinating. Like Tolstoy said, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and the Lahiri family is uniquely unhappy. There are some pretty heavy topics that arise in the story, so be aware if you are triggered by violence, domestic violence, child abuse, and alcoholism. Each of these topics comes up over the course of the story, and Roy deals with each of them beautifully and in a sensitive way. However, rather than staying focused on these heavy issues, the family projects all of their jealousy, anger, hurt, and frustration onto Lila stealing the house from under them. It was especially galling to hear her estranged mother repeatedly refer to her as ‘a child, just a child,’ when she is a self-sufficient and successful adult.

While she is in Kolkata, Lila chooses to stay in an empty apartment her father keeps nearby in case Lila needs it. This allows her to get a little bit of distance from the family, but it also creates a wedge between the Lahiri family and Lila, who isn’t a Lahiri but a De. I found Lila to be intelligent, creative, reasonable, and practical, even as she makes some poor decisions along the way. I didn’t expect her to be perfect, and even with her flaws, I found her to be both relatable and an easy-to-empathize-with character. 

The story really highlights the differences between American and Indian society—there are mentions of her family’s caste (Brahmin), the concerns and huge effort invested in maintaining the reputation of the family in society, and how improper behavior is punished through shunning, which can also negatively impact matches for a future arranged marriage. Here, if you sleep with a partner you aren’t married to, chances are it won’t become talk of the neighborhood and become un-marriageable, whereas in the neighborhood of Kolkata, everyone knows everyone else’s business. Meanwhile, I barely know the names of any of my neighbors, and I’ve been living here for decades.

Overall, this was a fantastic story. I was glued to the pages, and eventually switched to the audiobook while referring back to the print copy. Primarily because I didn’t want to have to stop reading when I had things to do, but Deepa Samuel deserves a shoutout for narrating this book. She did fantastic, and the soft hint of British-accented English that can be found in the upper classes was present in her mother, Maya. The other family members have varying intensities of Indian-accented English, while Lila speaks with English like a native-born American, yet she speaks Bengali fluently, if she’s a bit rusty. I loved seeing how the relationship between Lila and Maya changes over time as she learns more about who her mother was and is today, and the influences that made her that way. Lila seems to straddle two worlds, yet doesn’t feel as though she truly fits in to either world. She’s too Indian for America and too American for India, and her family doesn’t hesitate to point out how corrupted America has made her. This is compounded by the unintentional love triangle she finds herself in, when her first boyfriend shows up at the worst possible time. The book is well-written and addictive, with beautiful and vivid scenes of the chaotic situations Lila and her family find themselves in, and how they each grow, heal, and find peace over the course of her 8 weeks in India.

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