Margret and Vishnu

A mother’s worst fear is revealed when an innocent game reveals her children’s internalized assumptions of race, in this brutal, beautiful novel from an award-winning author, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Aysegül Savas.

Set over the course of a single, unrelenting day in 2002, Margret and Vishnu follows Meera—a mother of five, freshly postpartum, sleepless, raw—as she prepares for her four-year-old’s birthday party in a house alive with need, mess, and noise. Her eldest daughter, Margret, has developed a disturbing attachment to the newborn, believing herself to be his second mother. The family’s mixed-race identity, once background noise, has sharpened in the wake of 9/11, becoming both an external threat and an internal reckoning.

Through milk-stained shirts, missed moments, and the thousand invisible cuts of a life spent giving, Meera navigates the gut-punch of maternal regret, the impossibility of being everything to everyone, and the quiet terrors that take root in love. What does it mean to raise a daughter in a racist world when you are brown and she is paler than you? What damage do we inflict in trying to protect? How do we live with the violence of our own love?

Margret and Vishnu is a searing, lyrical meditation on the unspoken dangers of motherhood—the kind that linger in the body, ripple through generations, and hide in plain sight. It asks: Can you live with the harm you will cause your children, simply by loving them the only way you know how?