When a teenage girl dies in a car accident while returning home from school, her father is left to deal with his grief. Sent home from work for the crime of showing his emotions in front of strangers, he cannot bring himself to utter his unspoken thoughts of guilt and blame – not even to his wife. Alienated from the world and, to some degree, his own mind, and with his marriage slowly collapsing, the man starts to consider his loss.
In lyrical prose, Ami Rao experiments with language to explore grief, one of the most complex of human emotions. Inspired by the essays of Roland Barthes, this fragmented and philosophical novella is deeply moving.
Ami Rao is a British-American writer who was born in Calcutta, India and has lived and worked in New York City, London, Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ami has a BA in English Literature and Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and was most recently a banking professional in the City of London. When she is not reading, writing, cooking, eating, sailing or dancing, she can be found listening to jazz, her ‘one great unrequited love’. She also mentors girls of colour, with a keen emphasis on the merits of reading and education.
She co-wrote a sports memoir, Centaur, which was published in 2018. The book won the General Outstanding Sports Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2017. Her debut novel, David and Ameena, was published by Fairlight Books in 2021.