April 29, 2024
Ghosh debuts with a satisfying speculative collection about grief and desire. In “Desiccation,” an Indian American teen named Meghna falls for the only other Indian girl on her figure skating team, whom she suspects of being a vampire. “The Fig Tree” follows a married woman who returns from the U.S. to her birthplace of Kolkata to scatter her mother’s ashes. There, she glimpses a ghostly woman and wonders if her mother has returned. In “Leaving Things,” wolves overrun a city and devour the women. Afterward, a lonely survivor shelters a wolf baby, unsure what will happen when it grows up. “Lemon Boy” and “Natalya” explore the consequences of revisiting past relationships through the stories of protagonists confronted by the ghosts of their ex-lovers. Some of the shorter entries feel underdeveloped, but for the most part, Ghosh sharply draws the contours of her invented worlds and evokes her characters’ insatiable desires with vibrant imagery (“The whole apartment had turned into a gaping mouth, the wax its saliva pooling on the dining table”). These stories effectively sustain a sense of the uncanny. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME.