Girls Who Stray

A, 23 and unnamed, returns from an obscure British university armed with a useless degree to her new home in Noida—a home of feeble men—and the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. Serial procrastinator, overthinker, anxious and unhinged, A overcompensates her low self-esteem and sense of alienation with snootiness, even as she so badly wants to belong. Her only saving quality is that she is self-aware. Before long, A finds herself elbow-deep in an affair with a property developer and subsequently in a double murder. Faced with the anxieties of the crime along with precarities of living in a hypermodern city marked by seething inequality, A navigates heartbreak and tiny acts of freedom. Girls Who Stray is about the foolish choices you knew you shouldn’t have made. A dazzling literary debut, this coming-of-age thriller is a heady mix of real estate dons, crime and the twisted, twisted nature of love.