Mahala was born a maverick.

Adopted by her mother’s best friend and raised next door to her biological siblings, she grows up inside two families of Indian descent, in a colonial Caribbean society with a plan for her already written: leave school, marry well, run a household, arrange her own daughters’ weddings one day.

She is thirteen when four parents choose her husband. She refuses him, publicly and disastrously, in a way her family’s reputation will not quickly recover from.

At twenty-one she leaves St. Vincent for New York with a suitcase and no one’s permission, and finds work at a sewing machine in the garment district. What she builds there, on a seamstress’s wages and her own nerve, is a life of her own choosing, and a reckoning, years later, with the mother who gave her away.

Based on the true life of the author’s grandmother, Mahala is a family saga about two mothers, one daughter, and where women get their nerve.