Film alum Nayantara 'Tara' Roy '17 is set to release her second novel, Sisters of a Halved Heart, this June with Algonquin Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The novel follows Mira Guhathakurta, an Indian-American poetry editor at a magazine in New York who falls in love with an old college friend, Jack. When Jack is set to meet Mira’s family, Mira’s sister, Joy, "commits an unthinkable act of betrayal" which forces Mira to question her most important relationships and start her life over.
Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires, has praised the novel as “Lush, heady, sophisticated, suffused with atmospheric detail that spans continents…so riveting the reader will want to keep turning the pages, but so beautifully written it encourages lingering, savoring Roy’s elegant prose. The subject here is love in all its forms: filial, sisterly, thwarted, abiding, romantic, miraculous, and always, always surprising.”
We reached out to Roy about her time at Columbia and her writing. “My first novel (The Magnificent Ruins) was conceived entirely at Columbia, after I took [Adjunct Associate Professor] Benjamin Taylor’s fiction class, “Other People’s Secrets,” and the second (Sisters of a Halved Heart) was born of the ensuing years in New York. It’s fair to say that if I hadn’t chosen Columbia, and New York, my novels would be very different today.”
Roy’s debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice novel of 2024, an LA Times Editor’s Pick, a Washington Post Best Book, a People Magazine Best Book and an Apple best debut among others. The book is currently being adapted for television. In 2018, Roy won the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Prize for her short story, “8C.” Her plays have been performed internationally in the UK and India. By day, she is the Senior Vice President of Television at Sandbox Entertainment where she acquires and develops original scripted series. She was born in Kolkata and now lives in Los Angeles.
