Critiques en avant-premièreSaborna Roychowdhury

Everything Here Belongs to You follows Parul and Mohini through their early lives and coming of age. The two young women grow up under the same roof but live very different lives. Parul was six years old when her desperately poor father brought her from their village to live with the Sens, a middle-class Hindu family. Following common customs, Parul was taken in as a servant, asked to hide her Muslim idenity, and trained to do household chores alongside Mrs. Sen. By contrast, Mohini, the Sens' daughter, who is a few years younger than Parul, has led a life of privilege and education.

As Parul grows older, she becomes increasingly unhappy and resentful with her lot in life. Mohini struggles with their relationship as well, never sure whether to treat Parul as a sister or a servant. When Parul has a passionate, secret affair with Rahim, a radical Muslim, the careful order the Sens have maintained is thrown into chaos. Parul must decide where her loyalties lie when Rahim asks her to betray the Sens and endanger a young American man who is staying with them and to whom Mohini is attracted. Parul's choice will shock the family and determine everyone's future.

Torn between the tradition-bound India of her grandmother and the new, striving country of her peers, young college student Mini searches for love and meaning in gritty Calcutta. Attracted at first to Amitav, an idealistic rebel whose risky attempts to help his countrymen fill her with admiration, Mini is ultimately repulsed by his naivete and unwillingness to see beyond his own personal passions. When her parents begin the process of arranging a marriage, she doesn’t resist. With her new husband, Neel, she moves to Vancouver, discovering all the wonders of life in a developed country. But material comfort only makes her yearn with ever-growing intensity for the things she’s left behind, and when she returns to her native land five years later, she becomes acutely aware of the distance between dreams and reality, longing and fulfillment, love and sacrifice. “Saborna Roychowdhury addresses the perennial questions facing contemporary Indian women in her first novel, The Distance, and offers some surprising answers…. Ultimately, this novel offers not a love triangle between Mini, Amitav, and Neel, but a love letter to India itself.” –South Asian Review.