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In his second novel, The Age of Shiva (W.W. Norton, 2008), Manil Suri chronicles the life of Meera Sawhney, an exquisitely fleshed out woman who comes of age during India’s partition. A lush, witty, expansive novel, Shiva spans from Indian politics and mythology to Meera’s own intimate struggles of love, marriage, and motherhood. Lyrical and innovative, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel, Love Marriage (Random House, 2008) brilliantly unfolds how war can both form and fracture a family. Yalini’s parents fled the collapsing country of Sri Lanka and now she, caught between the history of her ancestors, their political involvements, and her own modern world, must decide where she stands.

In 2000, Time magazine named Manil Suri a “Person to Watch.” His first novel, The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, 2001), won the 2002 Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Observerhas called his latest, The Age of Shiva, a “story about the hope of redemption invested in passionate mother-love, a Lawrentian theme, but also one with roots in Indian mythology.” A Guggenheim Fellow, Suri works as a mathematics professor at The University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he also resides.

Journalist and novelist Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The American Prospect. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, she is the Vice President of the South Asian Journalists Association and a graduate board member of The Harvard Crimson. Author Daniel Alarcon calls her debut, Love Marriage, “a complex, moving evocation of love and war – two ideas which overlap more often, and more dramatically, than we often care to recognize.”