Thank you to my virtual tribe, Fiction Writers Co-op, for making the solitary life of a writer a little less so.

Finally, thanks to my family and friends: Mom and Dad, for their unwavering support and love; Preety and Vikas, and Nikhil and Brahm, who helped reacquaint me with the heart and soul of an adventurous adolescent; Ram and Connie, for always being there through good and bad.

My deepest thanks to Anand, who read and believed in this story first, and who remains an unflappable champion and solid rock of support when it matters most. To Mira and Bela, who, amid the complexities of adolescence, always inspire me to see the immense possibility and utter wonder in the world.

And to my dear friends, for forgiving me when I disappear for long periods into my writing mind, and for always being there when I emerge, to share joys and divide heartaches.

The shape of my family includes all of you, and for that, I am ever grateful.

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About the Author

Meet Shilpi Somaya Gowda

About the Book

Behind the Book

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An Excerpt from The Golden Son

About the Author

Meet Shilpi Somaya Gowda

SHILPI SOMAYA GOWDA was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. Her first novel, Secret Daughter, was published in 2010 and became an international bestseller, selling more than one million copies worldwide. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. She holds an MBA from Stanford University, and a Bachelor’s Degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She lives in California with her husband and children.

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About the Book

Behind the Book

People often ask me about the inspiration for my novels. When I reach back into my personal history to try to identify the first seed of the idea, I usually have to go quite far, a couple of decades at least. I discover there is usually a thought or question lodged in my mind by some experience which, over time, has grown and accumulated weight. It is a question I cannot answer, often because it is fundamentally unanswerable. And so my subconscious brain begins to dwell on it, to turn it over and back, to view it from different angles, to posit hypothetical answers and solutions. What if? Perhaps this is why? Could it be so?

After three novels, I now understand that this act of the seeded question, and my mind’s slow but relentless engagement with it, is the reason that I write. I write to make sense of things, to understand the world around me, to answer the questions that seem impossible, and sometimes to try to change an outcome, if only on the page.

With The Shape of Family, the first spark of inspiration can be traced back to an experience in my early twenties. I was recently graduated from university, living in Manhattan and working at my first job, when I received an unexpected phone call. A friend from college had been found dead, under mysterious circumstances, on the other side of the country. We were told very little; it was a murder-suicide, there were no witnesses. Days later, friends and I traveled from New York to North Carolina for the memorial service. During the eight-hour drive, the flimsy windows of the soft-top Jeep rattled at highway speeds and were pelted with heavy rains apropos of our mood, rendering any conversation impossible. And even if we could speak, how could we possibly make sense of the situation?