announcing: UNPRECEDENTED TIMES!!!

my debut literary novel will be published by Henry Holt in 2026

Hello friends!

Some of you know that I have been hard at work on a novel for some time. I’ve referred to it as my Big Girl Book, the story I wrote because I lived through something — we all did — and it turned out afterwards that I had a lot to say. Zora Neale Hurston said it best: there are years that ask questions, and years that answer. My literary novel, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES, was born of one of the most bewildering years of my life, 2020, and is a long, inconclusive answer to questions I’ve had about how to grow up and take ownership of a world that is actively burning down around you.

The resulting book is like The Idiot meets the lesbian masterdoc meets the end of the world. It is a novel about queer Gen Z identity, desire in a post-MeToo world, the revelatory power of the Homoerotic Female Friendship, weird attachment styles with your mother, whether we can overcome our historical circumstances, and what we owe each other when shit hits the fan. I am so grateful and proud to share that UNPRECEDENTED TIMES has found a home at Henry Holt and will be yours in the summer of 2026!

What it’s about: UNPRECEDENTED TIMES follows eighteen-year-old Rishi Kumar, who arrives at Stanford with the vague goal of living a life worth writing about. With the dual recklessness of a budding writer and a homosexual, she dives head-first into first loves, complex female friendships, and literature classes, seeking to conquer the amorphous, amoral project of adulthood in a world that might collapse before she’s gotten a chance to change it. But no sooner has Rishi’s own world ignited than the rest of the world is shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic. Stanford closes its campus, prematurely ending a chapter of Rishi’s life — these are unprecedented times, authority figures keep announcing. Cast unexpectedly into the real world, Rishi moves into a farm commune with her college classmates, desperate to salvage the original plot of her story. Faced instead by a year of unbridled joy and unexpected violence, Rishi freestyles her way through a painful, tender coming-of-age journey.

oops!

Getting to write a novel is the greatest gift on earth, but getting to publish it is something else entirely. I know I have been lucky once already, with All the Yellow Suns, but this feels different — not just because this is my first novel for adults, or because I wrote it as an adult, but because I wrote it on purpose. When I wrote ATYS at nineteen, my main goal was to have fun. I did it because it was 2020 and I was stuck in my childhood bedroom and I wanted to write so I wouldn’t lose my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me then that the book would mean something to other people, would offer insight or tenderness or blow kisses on behalf of queer people in Florida. I sort of had to adopt all these lofty goals last-minute when it was time to promote the book. Pretend I’d been so serious all along.

(Never not thinking about this one-word review of ATYS).

But with UT, I was locked in. I had read many more books and studied the lives of writers to the point that I could imagine myself as one. I actually submitted it as my honors thesis at Stanford in 2024, for which I was required to create a bibliography of the works it conversed with, all the books that had subtly or massively made an impression on me. I realized that what happened, between ATYS and UT, is that I had become aware of the context in which I existed, the literary and political trends that were shaping the world around me, and with UT I had many artistic goals of my own, and made continual and conscious choices to execute them. Here were some of my goals:

• to write a good Gen Z novel (I assume there will one day be one because there is such a thing as a “millennial novel,” supposedly marked by alienation, detachment, self-awareness). I have observed quietly as people my age came into consciousness, developed our capacity for great activism and great evil, forged by the twin hellfires of the Internet and pandemic. When you are told repeatedly you are going to save the world, but then it shuts down before you’ve had a chance to change it, and meanwhile everyone is fighting all the time, it results in a particular, earnest aesthetic that I’ve noticed most readily on TikTok. I wanted to create a literary voice that feels quintessentially Gen Z, writing the way my friends think and talk. (Emotional excess, pathological over-sharing, characters so anxious to connect with others that they leave claw marks behind.) I’m curious about how hyper-awareness of political injustice impacts my characters’ ability to form relationships. My protagonists are earnest, proud women raised by the post-#MeToo internet, trying to navigate a sexual terrain they know is not built for them, aware of histories of injustice that impact their abilities to connect. To what extent can Gen Z characters, at a malleable point in their lives, alter generational circumstances and imagine alternate futures?

• to make sense of a very confusing, painful year of my life and that of my friends’; to write a time capsule of a historical, political, and personal moment that challenged me, an age where we could’ve become anyone at all

• to contribute thoughtfully to genres of fiction I adore, specifically the campus novel, but also the sad girl novel and Asian American / South Asian diasporic novel. UT is an accumulation and reimagination of many of the genres that shaped me, which I have great love for and also quibbles with. I will reflect more on these soon.

• to write an overpowering first-person narrator whom the reader can see through and around, disagree with, pity, but hopefully also root for

• to challenge the female coming-of-age genre, which skews straight and white, raising the stakes to reflect the literary sensibilities of queer Gen-Z readers. I started writing this novel shortly after my Sally Rooney diss went viral and I realized a lot of people were hungry for new stories.

• to explore the power of self-narrativizing for queer women of color: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.

Anyway, I had all these goals. I don’t know if I achieved them — I guess, in 2026, you will tell me. Mostly I followed my own instinct and did what was fun for me. I like finding language for specific feelings that visit my heart. Right now, the feeling I write from most readily is bewilderment, because I am still very early in my life, and I don’t know that much about the world. ATYS was a book born out of 2016, the year of the first Trump election, the summer I came out and also when 49 people were murdered in a gay nightclub in my hometown. It is a coming-of-rage novel about being a teenager, searching for ways of living in your new skin, and realizing you are totally at odds with the world around you. And UT is my 2020 book. (At this rate if I am writing novels about being existentially confused during election years, maybe another one is due soon?)

I am very, very grateful to have sold this book. I am excited to transition from YA to literary fiction, the genre I read and love most. (At first I called it my “adult novel,” but then people said it sounded like I’d written porn, so I stopped. Though no shade to porn — this book has its share of sex scenes. One very nice rejection for this book noted that I am a “tender and perceptive” writer about sex!!) Full disclosure: I am still learning what it means to carry myself as a serious writer of literary fiction. I feel a large gulf between myself and the literary writers I admire, mostly because I am twenty-three and haven’t really been around the block yet, but I have eighteen months to start acting like it. The day I sold the book, my dear friend V, who is also an emerging artist — an actor — looked at me very seriously and said: “In 2025, you start running up cringe mountain. No excuses.” By this he meant, this is the year I begin investing in myself. Sharing my work. Telling people, hey, I have a book! I hate self-promotion, I hate whatever Industrial Complex it’s called when young female novelists market their book and their personas as a joint, shiny “it-girl” package that blurs the writer and character, I hate capitalism, whatever. But I also want this book to reach people who’ll like it, and to have the opportunity to write books for the rest of my life. I don’t really have a backup plan.

I repeat this to myself often: When I leap, a net appears. This book is both the leap and the net.

If you want to support me, I would be grateful if you reshared the announcement post, as widely as possible, so that everyone who’s ever wronged me will find out about it and confront the fact that I’m balling right now. Just kidding — so that this book reaches more queer women, survivors, oldest daughters, the girls for whom I wrote this book. Preorder links will come much later. Right now I am emailing the manuscript to my trusted friends with very specific instructions (mark out anything that doesn’t bang) — thankfully I still have a few months to salvage it. I am hard at work to bring you the very best book possible. I hope you will feel that when you read it.

Thank you for reading this, and more soon!