'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
