It is the summer of 2015 and Lila De recieves a phone call from her semi- estranged mother. Her beloved grandfather has passed away and left the ancestral family home to her. At the age of 16, she left her mother and maternal family to live with her father, she has not been back to Kolkota since then. She is apprehensive about seeing her mother again, with whom she's always had a tense relationship. As excited as she is to see her extended family again, she knows they are wary of her, especially now that she owns the house they've lived in forever.
She now has to make decisions regarding the grand, but dilapidated house, while simultaneously keeping the family happy. Lila's cousin, Biddy, is getting married and there is a lot to be done to make the house ready for all the festivities. As she becomes immersed into her family, she learns of all the hidden secrets and resentments within the walls. Age old customs and beliefs are held onto very strongly and Lila has to come to terms with quietly accepting them as well. While the relationship with her mother is just as strained as ever, she finds comfort in the arms of her teenage love, but that has it's own complications.

This book was almost a DNF for me but I pushed through and I'm glad I did. I wouldn't say the book was slow by any means, but it reads more like a long family saga, although it takes place over just 8 weeks or so. I did have a hard time finishing it quickly and think it was probably a bit longer than it should have been. I liked how complex all the characters were and as an Indian-American myself, I could understand all the difficult family dynamics and how things can often be shoved under the rug and not acknowledged. How society's perception is considered so important, and can also be the most damaging. The house was a great metaphor for the family inside. While on the outside it was grand, the insides were deteriorating.

Thank you to Netgalley and Algonquin Books for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Trauma does not leave our bodies easily. It is inherited by our children and translated, an inevitable language in our genes and blood, insidious in its ability to lie in wait under newborn skin, always at the ready to eventually morph and strike, and in that moment you will be fathoming of how certainly and quickly you might have turned into your mother. There was to be no freedom for us—not for my grandmother, my mother or myself. This I knew finally. Our unending cycles of hatred looped around us, a circular, rhythmic beat clanging on the prison walls of our violence, as we passed them on, calling them our mansions, generation after generation.

I have not been this enthralled in a family saga in quite some time. Immigrant families. Asian families. Indian families. Deep down, we're all the same. Secrets and lies will destroy us, but not so much as outsiders trying to pry in.

Lila is an editor at a prestigious publishing house. She has lived on the East Coast for quite some time, having followed her father there after he and her mother divorce. That scandal still follows her mother in India, a very traditional society.

One of Lila's authors, and occasional lover, Seth, is everything a pretentious rich white Jewish boy is: he lives in Brooklyn, he writes, and he is just a tad emotionally unavailable. If you're a LA girlie, he could be a Silver Lake boy.

He had been born into wealth and bred in Manhattan; at his book launch, his friends were familiar faces—occupants of the middle ranks of the Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and my bookshelf. It was territory I knew how to navigate, and I prided myself on having reached the same literary circles without pedigree or trust fund or whiteness.


Aetos, a big corporation I liken to Amazon, is buying out the publishing house. Changes are being made. Layoffs occur. Lila, however, is promoted. Is this a diversity promotion? Is it something else? We don't know, because concurrently, her maternal grandfather in India dies. He has left her the family home. This doesn't go over well with his siblings, various family members, and her mother, all of whom still live in the house.

As soon as Lila steps off the plane, questions abound. Not about her dead grandfather. Not about why she has inherited the house. About her love life. Asian families truly are all the same.

"So do you have a husband yet or not?"

"Yes, he's in my bag. I forgot him on the way over here."


Lila, like most big city people, is in therapy. Her mother plays a large part in this. I won't place all of the blame on one parent. I also haven't forgotten sad Jewish boy Seth. However, there is a boy from her youth still lurking in the background. Now that she is back in India, he is no longer in the background. He is, however, married. That doesn't stop them.

Lila's mother is rather invasive about her love life, or lack thereof. This sounds like an exact conversation I've had with my parents.

"Well, I'm not seeing anyone exclusively right now."

"What does that mean? What is 'exclusive'? Like, special? Like an exclusive designer dress?"


Family sagas aren't really family sagas without secrets, lies, and a little crime. I won't say I was floored by what happens toward the end, and I won't say I'm unhappy, either. You get what you get.

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Algonquin Books

I LOVED this book so much! It is a great read. I have recommended this to a lot of people and suggested it to several bookclubs as well.

The Magnificent Ruins centers around Lila, an Indian American woman and successful book editor in NY who inherits her family’s crumbling ancestral mansion. As the new heir, Lila travels back to Kolkata to confront her immediate family who all reside in the home and reckon with their complicated history. With lush prose and richly drawn characters, Roy transports the reader to the bustling city of Kolkata while exploring bicultural identity, complex family dynamics, and generational trauma. An engaging and immersive family drama.

Totally absorbing, this novel offers up a family saga, adding in the Kolkata setting, great characters and a touch of politics, making for a fantastic read. Lila De unexpectedly inherits her family home in Kolkata. Leaving her Brooklyn home, her new promotion, and her friends, Lila flies to Kolkata to encounter her family questioning the legitimacy of the terms of the will. At the same time, Lila confronts the complicated history with her mother, eventually uncovering many family secrets and regrets. I loved the book and highly recommend it for the Indian culture, the family relationships, and the excellent writing. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Just when you think that your family could be the most dysfunctional in the world along comes the Lahiri family to set all of that straight and win the prize. If it could be considered a prize.

Lila De has been living in the United States for sixteen years since her father brought her over as a teenager when her mother’s abusiveness grew to be too much. Now Lila is a book editor, achieving a huge promotion when the small publishing company she works for is absorbed by a larger one. With that news, however, comes the news of her grandfather’s death and the fact that he has left her his house. The house comes with multiple floors of relatives including her mother. Lila returns to Kolkata to find a charged political situation as well as high tensions in the house as her relatives won’t give up their home without a fight in Nayantara Roy’s debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins.

This tale of behaviors recurring through different generations with bad behaviors being overlooked supposedly in the name of love and compassion is a stunning debut by Nayantara Roy. I did not find this an easy book to read for a variety of reasons including the unlikability of most of the characters (Biddy, Vik, and Seth being exceptions as well as the recently deceased grandfather) but also because the political unrest just brought my own environment constantly to mind.

While most of the novel is told in first person from Lila’s pov, one chapter is told from the pov of a Muslim police officer. Although jarring in its appearance, it served to enhance the political situation charged with bigotry and ethnic bias but also gave us an outsider’s perception of Lila, which the readers of first person fiction are hardly ever permitted. As well, it demonstrated how personal gains supersede law in even a very ethical, intelligent person. However, I’ll just mention that to my mind this was a gray area. Sorry for the ambiguity; I don’t want to give away the details of an event that happens later in the novel.

I did find the 448 pages to be a struggle at times, but, again, in a different situation (not the week of November 5th, for instance) that might not have been true. I was glad to have read it and enjoyed the rich cultural aspects that Roy provided.

Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy.

A fantastic novel of generational trauma that spans across continents. When Lila finds out she has inherited the massive family home in Kolkata after her grandfather's death she goes back to her place of birth to find the home in near ruins. She eagerly jumps in to rebuild and make the home into a place safe for her family members to continue living in. But, they are unsure of her intentions and try to block her every step of the way.

We soon learn that it's not just the home that is a magnificent ruin, but also her family. Too much trauma, not enough trust, and a good amount of abuse ( emotional, verbal, and physical ) has broken them down.

Can she rebuild the ruins of her family and home, will she even want to stay if she does? A stark reminder that secrets rarely stay secret forever, and the repercussions can continue to reverberate through the family long afterwards.

A vibrant, emotional family drama that swept me across continents and surprised me at every turn.

Lila De works hard at her publishing job in New York, and she is finally seeing some upward progress when she receives a call from her mother in India.

Lila’s grandfather has passed away, and shockingly, he has left Lila the historic family estate, though in disrepair. Now, she must travel back to India, the home she left at age sixteen, to face her mother and much of her family, who all question why she inherited the family home.

I loved the family dynamics at play here. Lila and her mother have a very complex relationship. Lila’s cousin is getting married, so now she must help plan the wedding. Lila runs into her first love, and it gets messy. All the while, she must deal with legal issues and personal grudges regarding the mansion she just inherited. I also felt for Lila, as her family treated her like she didn’t know things about India, yet she had lived there until she was sixteen.

When I’m thoroughly immersed in Lila’s family drama and the Indian culture and cuisine, the author throws in another death, adding a bit of mystery to this amazing debut.

𝐴 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑔𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑓𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑦, 𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 ℎ𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑠.


Thank you @algonquinbooks for the gifted ebook via #NetGalley.

Thank you so much to Algonquin and NetGalley for an early copy in exchange for my honest review.

Readers who enjoy multigenerational family sagas will want to pick up The Magnificent Ruins. The story follows Lila who reaches a career crossroads at the same moment her beloved grandfather dies and wills the family house in Kolkata to her -- the house where her extended family and her manic-depressive mother all live. So Lila takes a leave of absence to travel back to Kolkata, where she attempts to balance the conflicting wants and needs of her aunts, uncles, and cousins with making the right choices for her.

This is a rich reading experience. I found myself sinking into it like a comfy chair and I really enjoyed Lila's narration. There are plenty of interesting observations and layers to the story that concern Lila's career, what she has worked for and whether that effort has paid off and gotten her to a place where she actually wants to be. I also enjoy a family saga and there is plenty of drama, intrigue, history, and secrets within these pages. This is a solid debut and I think it would make a good Christmas gift for anyone who likes to spend the entire week between Christmas and NYE reading.

Following a young woman’s return to her family home in Kolkata, this book explores themes of inherited trauma and cross cultural belonging. I thought the descriptions of the family mansion and Kolkata were so vivid and the details concerning food made me salivate. I got annoyed sometimes at the main character but I do think she found herself in the end. I received digital copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

{3.5 stars}

Thanks Algonquin Books for the gifted copy. All opinions below are my own.

Lila is an editorial assistant living in New York with very little in the way of commitments until she receives a call that she has inherited her grandfather's Indian mansion upon his death. She is shocked as generations of her family including her mother currently live in the sprawling yet dilapidated estate. She flies home to India to find that the rest of the family is angry and planning to contest her ownership. What follows is 8 weeks of their lives with Lila reimmersing herself in her family member's problems which include domestic abuse (both physical and emotional), gambling and alcoholism. What was once a storied Indian noble family has fallen apart at the seams and she needs to decide what is the right thing to do for all of them.

I have to admit, there were a lot of unlikable characters in this one. That said, it felt like a very realistic family with complex dynamics and everyday struggles. I didn't like the way they treated each other for most of the story. I did enjoy the immersion in the culture as they gave us the family history and planned the family wedding. The ending sort of took a turn that I wasn't expecting and I'm still not sure was necessary but I get the message that messy families will always be messy.

Read this one if you liked The Museum of Failures or The Book of Everlasting Things.

In some ways, I would consider Lila De a lucky woman. She’s an editor at a rising publishing house in New York. (I would love to have this job, if I couldn’t be a librarian.) She makes enough to afford her own apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world. On the other hand, she’s less lucky in love and downright unlucky when it comes to some members of her family. Lila’s sudden inheritance of her grandfather’s house in Kolkata—where many of the members of her mother’s family live—turns out to be as much good luck as it is bad. The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy, follows Lila as she wrestles with literal and metaphorical inheritances, good and bad love, and the past and the future of her very messy family.

The Lahiri house is in bad shape when Lila arrives in Kolkata. Nothing has been modernized or even repaired for a long time. But the condition of the house is secondary to the turmoil of feelings Lila experiences when she sees her mother, uncles, grandmother, and other relatives after so long away. Distance was Lila’s best defense against getting sucked into her mother’s drama (I suspect a personality disorder here) and the pettiness of her spoiled relatives. (Her uncles have never worked. They live off of the interest from the Lahiri trust, which was set up decades ago when the family was much richer.) She loves the Lahiris but they drive her insane.

Because Lila is a fixer, she meets with lawyers and contractors to try and restore the Lahiri house to something approaching its former glory. And because the Lahiris are who they are, they interfere constantly. Even more lawyers are involved. Fights are had. A wedding is held. A lover drops in at the worst time. And, along the way, a lot of secrets about the family are spilled. Reading this book made me feel like a fly on the wall, overhearing things that the Lahiris really don’t want other people to know. The gossip is delicious but, after a while, I kind of felt like I needed a bit of therapy to deal with the emotional backwash. I realize this sounds bad but I really appreciated learning from Lila’s attempts to understand her difficult family members. She has a bigger heart than I do.

Estranged from her mother, young lila, has made a life for herself in Brooklyn. Her world comes to a hault when she inherits an ancestral home. This home is in Calcutta, India. upon arrival she is quickly greeted by unhappy family members. This is a tender and heartfelt read. I loved it!

As always, thanks to Algonquin Books for sending me this ARC! I think this is the first book I have read published by them and it won't be my last.

Reading this book was like reading a Bollywood movie! Every emotion you can think of was conjured while reading this story. It even had a little twist at the end that I was not expecting and I audibly said "WAIT WHAT!?" and had to go back and reread a little bit for the "O.M.G." moment.
The author did an amazing job with the world building. I could see every landscape and taste every meal as if I was standing in the world with the characters. Also the little tid-bits of history on the region and political climate added so much to the story.

The Magnificent Ruins is a compelling and moving debut from Nayantara Roy. While it may have some flaws, the novel's strengths make it a worthwhile read. Roy's vivid writing, well-developed characters, and nuanced exploration of themes make the book a standout. The novel will appeal to fans of family dramas and stories about identity and belonging. Readers who enjoy character-driven fiction with a strong sense of place will also find much to appreciate in The Magnificent Ruins.

“The Magnificent Ruins” by Nayantara Roy is an intriguing family saga filled with complex relationships and rich cultural descriptions, set against the backdrop of Kolkata. When Lila De, a young Indian American editor from Brooklyn, unexpectedly inherits her family’s ancestral home, she finds herself navigating not only old family resentments and secrets but also her own identity caught between two worlds.

The novel does a beautiful job capturing the sights and sounds of Kolkata, immersing readers in the vibrancy of the city and the multifaceted Lahiri family. Roy’s descriptive prose brings the setting and family home to life, making it easy to feel the weight of Lila’s inheritance and the fractured family dynamics.

However, the book can feel a bit drawn out, with some side plots—like the love interests and a late mystery—seeming unnecessary for the main narrative. Though the story meanders at times, “The Magnificent Ruins” still offers a heartfelt exploration of family, legacy, and self-discovery. Fans of immersive generational tales will find much to enjoy here, even if the pacing is a bit slow.

Thank you to NetGalley and Algonquin books for the advance copy. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

A wonderful family saga ,we follow Lila from her home in NewYork back to her family home in India.,after her grandpa dies.I was immediately drawn in to the story the family all the characters.I enjoyed this absorbing novel from beginning to end ,looking forward to more from this author.#netgalley #algonquinbooks.

Thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for this advance reader copy, in exchange for an honest review. I’ve just finished this book and all I’m just absolutely in awe— this book is definitely a contender for one of my favorites this year and I think it is one that I will enjoy coming back to over the years, just stunning. The Magnificent Ruins is the story of Lila De, a young Indian American woman who immigrated to the US with her father in her teens from Kolkata, still in the wake of her parents scandalous divorce and from her difficult relationship with her mother. Lila, now age 29, is a successful book editor in Brooklyn and her world is upended when she receives a call telling her that her beloved grandfather has passed away and left the historic, sprawling family near-mansion to her, along with the estate. This kicks off the events of the story, as Lila travels back to Kolkata to reckon with this and with her immediate family, all of whom live in the home she’s just inherited.

This book was absolutely lush with beautiful prose and vivid descriptions of the city of Kolkata including the homes, the people, the food, the clothes, etc. The author’s writing was so evocative and transporting throughout the entire book and so, even though it was long, it didn’t feel like it. I was content to just live with these characters and within this setting for the whole reading experience.

The characters were so richly developed, as well, and felt like they were truly real. The author breathed so much life into them, showcasing their flaws, quirks, positive characteristics, and complex behaviors in such a way that they were fully three dimensional. There were a lot of themes and topics covered in this story and through the slow, languorous plot, they had the opportunity to truly flesh themselves out and sit with you. Topics like domestic abuse, caste, and generational trauma revealed themselves through these characters and were given the space to exist here, with no easy solution presented to take away from the realistic harsh nature of these topics. Our main character, Lila, struggles notably throughout this book with the back and forth pull she feels being Indian and American, being part of her mothers family and her fathers family, and what all of these emotions mean for her future— romantically, professionally, and even geographically. I so enjoyed being on this emotional journey with Lila and the entire Lahiri family. There is a section in the book where the author talks about Kolkata days versus New York days and how they stretch out lazily, without rush or haste, but instead, filled with relaxation and moments of joy and warmth— that is how reading this book felt, like beautiful, enjoyable length of a journey with these characters. I loved every minute of it.

I would highly recommend this book to literary fictions fans, readers who enjoy multi-generational family stories, and readers who enjoy character centric novels. I can’t wait to see this book out in the world and look forward to revisiting it myself with a finished copy, once it’s published!

This is a long book but it never felt that way. I was totally engrossed from the start of the novel. The writing style reminds me a little of Elena Ferrante as it's internal yet still a bit at arms length. The relationships are intense and very complicated in the family and the drama about the house and the estate asks why the grandfather would choose her over everyone else was full of tension. The main character has a well intentioned sentiment about the house and yet she has a lot of growth to do during the book that she is unaware of. It seems that I'm reading a bunch of books with the common theme of trauma and it's effects on women. Or am I just picking that theme out since I read What My Bones Know, maybe. Either way, there is a lot going on in this book and I thought it was excellent.

India - Lila is an Indian American book editor living in New York who returns to Kolkata when she learns that she has inherited her family’s enormous ancestral home, and the secrets that lie within it.

There is so much Indian culture in this novel and I enjoyed reading about it - Roy provides a rich imagery of the streets of India, from the food, architecture to customs, while also examining the way Indian lives are impacted by colonialism and modernization. With fluid prose, what Roy does even better is to expose the Indian family dynamics, with all its complexity and messiness. Much like the mansion left to Lila, the complex layers of the Indian family are dissected by Roy in the most raw way and the reader is able to navigate through the struggles of (the child of) divorced parents, siblings' relationship and convoluted mother-daughter bond.

Through the main character who grapples with the clash of cultures and at the same time, is trying to find her place whether in America or India, this book captures well themes of identity, family, generational trauma and belonging. Roy crafts often lost characters haunted by the legacies of their own stories, they are flawed and relatable in different ways. Lila, I have to say, gave me mixed feelings - as much as I wished to understand her as a whole, some of her decisions and actions can seem quite annoying which, alongside the side characters whose dynamics lack depth, they don't really leave an emotional imprint.

The plot acquires some dynamism when offering glimpses of the publishing industry, which I find these sections very engaging. Although I enjoyed the backstories in the Lahiri household which invite a further comprehension of the characters, the amount of side characters and side stories might distract the reader from the main plot. More often than not, there's a lull in the plot, which makes it lengthy, therefore detracting from one's full investment in the story. The ending felt quite convenient, which I found satisfaction in certain aspects while being unconvinced by other plot devices (especially regarding the closure of one particular character, the romance and politics).

THE MAGNIFICENT RUINS is for those wanting to read about realistic and chaotic family relationships and complexity of belonging. While this novel adds a unique perspective, I would have appreciated this book more with a better execution and editing.