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Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

A MIRROR MADE OF RAIN

Naheed Phiroze Patel

A Mirror Made of Rain is a devastating coming-of-age novel about the wounds of inherited trauma.
Noomi Wadia, a bright, quick-tempered young woman with a penchant for getting into trouble, struggles with the fraught relationship she has with her mother. She grows from a lonely, wild-hearted teenager to a troubled adult who finds love but not happiness. Soon, Noomi realizes that her worst fears have come to pass - she is trapped in the same cycle of self-destructiveness as her mother, and she must battle her impulses or risk losing everything.

Naheed Phiroze Patel's astonishing debut brings alive a world and characters that are complex and breathtakingly real, and portrays with honesty and empathy the darkness that addiction and mental illness cast over a family.

Naheed Phiroze Patel is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, HuffPost, The Rumpus, Scroll.in, New England Review, BOMB Magazine, EuropeNow Journal, PEN America, and elsewhere. She lives in the greater New York City area and works as a freelance essayist, interviewer and critic.
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Published 2022-04-19 by Unnamed Press

Comments

Naheed Phiroze Patel's sharp, glittering prose powerfully reveals the raw underbelly of a damaged family in this terrific debut.

Alternating between past and present, the novel unspools the dissonance, fragility and rupture that lie at its heart, layer by layer, in delicately wrought and dexterous passages across its four parts. All happy families are alike, but every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way. ... Read more...

The author lends us some insight into the making of her debut novel. Read more...

India: HarperCollins India (Pub May 2021)

Naheed Patel's debut novel says a lot about its unlikeable narrator, and more about you, the reader - 'A Mirror Made of Rain' is an angry young novel told by an angry young woman. ... Read more...

By turns fizzy and funny, poignant and sad, A Mirror Made of Rain is an acute, intensely readable exploration of hurt and resilience.

...In the novel, the setting and character portrayal are all on point and the story of a troubled family moves well. The characters arouse curiosity and we want to know how far the author will take them or restore their sense of self, whether they will find peace or happiness or band-aid their damaged parts.... Read more...

A Mirror Made of Rain is luminous - a blistering and unflinching commentary on family, love, pain, addiction and destruction. We are lucky to have Naheed Phiroze Patel writing.

Naheed Phiroze Patel paints a delicate and ironic portrait of small-town India as seen through the rueful and self-ironizing eyes of a young Parsi who will not make a grab for the brass ring.