What You Call Winter

With this collection of beautifully written, interconnected stories, Nalini Jones establishes herself as a strong, new voice in contemporary fiction. Home to her characters is a Catholic town in India--an India unfamiliar to most American readers--but the tales of their relationships, ambitions, and concerns are altogether universal, capturing the miscommunication, expectations, joys, and losses experienced by families everywhere.

A mother pours her religious fervor out in letters to her son whom she has sent away to seminary. Years after his father's sudden death in a movie theater, an older man begins to see his long-dead parent riding a bicycle around town. A brash, eccentric aunt speaks her mind and leaves home without a trace, but not without haunting her godson. Returning home to tend to her mother's cataract surgery, a daughter wonders how much she should reveal of her new life in the United States. American childhoods, Indian childhoods; love abroad, love at home--the worlds of these characters mirror and refract one another in a play of revelation and secret.

Gracefully and with deep emotional intelligence, Jones vividly evokes the ebb and flow of life across several generations and continents. What You Call Winter is a resonant, beguiling fiction debut.

Composed of interconnected stories that move within and around a small Catholic community in India, this debut collection heralds the arrival of a graceful, sparkling new voice.

Nine-year-old Marian Almeida covets the green dress her parents have set aside for her birthday, but when her desire gets the best of her, dangerous events ensue. Roddy D'Souza sees his long-dead father bicycling down the street, and wonders if his own life is nearing its close. Essie, having sent her son to boarding school, weighs his unhappiness against the opportunities his education will provide. With empathy and poise, Nalini Jones creates in What You Call Winter a spellbinding work of families in an uncertain world.

Nalini Jones was born in Newport, Rhode Island, graduated from Amherst College, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Ontario Review, Glimmer Train, Dogwood, and Creative Nonfiction's "Living Issue." She is a Stanford Calderwood Fellow of the MacDowell Colony, and has recently taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York and Fairfield University in Connecticut.