Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

LATE BLOOMERS

Deepa Varadarajan

In this charming, witty, and engaging debut novel from an exciting new voice in fiction an Indian-American family is turned upside down when the parents divorce - thirty-six years into their arranged marriage - as Suresh and Lata Raman find themselves starting new paths in life.

Suresh is trying to navigate the world of online dating on a website that caters to Indians and is striking out at every turn until he meets a mysterious, devastatingly attractive younger woman named Malika, who seems to be smitten with him. Meanwhile, Lata is enjoying her newfound independence after decades in an arranged marriage, but she's caught off guard when a professor in his early sixties starts to flirt with her. Priya, the former couple's unmarried daughter, thinks her father's online pursuits are distasteful but hides a secret affair of her own, while their son Nikesh pretends at a seemingly perfect marriage with his law-firm colleague and their young son, but hides the truth of what his relationship really entails.

Uncovering family secrets, confronting the limits of love and loyalty, and exploring life's second chances, LATE BLOOMERS is the perfect beach or vacation read for fans of Emma Straub and Amanda Eyre Ward, who love charming, heartfelt stories about family and relationship dynamics.

Deepa Varadarajan is a law professor who is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Georgia State University. She is a graduate of the University of Texas and Yale Law School. Deepa attended Tin House Writer's Workshop and the Napa Valley Writer's Conference, and has studied with Whitney Otto and Antonya Nelson. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and children.

Available products
Book Published 2023-05-02 by Random House

Comments

Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, Late Bloomers is a charming story about starting over, stumbling, and finding yourself at any age. I found myself rooting for Varadarajan's characters as they navigated love, loneliness, and the complicated family relationships that define them.

Varadarajan has written her characters with intelligence and compassion, imbuing them with complexity; each narrative mirrors, refracts, refutes, and informs the others in what's ultimately a tender exploration of family patterns, choices, regrets, and the possibility for change... Warm, hopeful, often charming. The Ramans are an idiosyncratic oasis in the world of literary unhappy families.

Late Bloomers is about love won and lost and rearranged and rediscovered; it is about how love and family can be made and remade; it is about the marvelous fluidity of love. Varadarajan writes about the everyday life of the Raman family with so much humor and affection that she makes the ordinary feel extraordinary. I adore this family and I adore this book.

Late Bloomers follows the lives of a South Indian-American family as they deal with love in all its permutations: marital, romantic, familial, lost, and unrequited. Deepa Varadarajan deftly weaves modern-day problems like internet dating and complicated living arrangements with the eternal yearning for acceptance and the ageless desire to live up to family expectations. Secrets, relationships, and food; there truly is nothing more you could ask for in a novel.

A stirring, tender novel about the bonds and binds between families and strangers. By reversing roles in the immigrant tug of war, here parents are online dating and the children looking to 'settle down', Varadarajan poignantly delivers a page turner in which both the young and the not so young have to reconfigure expectations and forge new pathways in order to find fulfillment. Late Bloomers asks what it means to be a family - a happy family - in a rapidly changing world and offers promising answers. You'll laugh and cry through this deft tale about personal growth, family entanglements and reignited dreams.

Deepa Varadarajan's debut novel is funny, heartbreaking, engrossing, surprising, smart. Late Bloomers tells the story of the Raman family, beginning after the children have grown up. I never knew what would happen next and I absolutely loved that about this beautiful book.