The Unbroken Coast

“What a beautifully formed novel. With its changing portraits of two families in a Catholic fishing village outside Mumbai, The Unbroken Coast does what the best fiction does—it is utterly particular and utterly large. And I could not put it down.”
—Joan Silber, author of Improvement and Mercy

“The Unbroken Coast is a beguiling epic about a Catholic community in Mumbai grappling with the treacheries of progress and the inexorable march of time. Illness devastates the novel’s humble, endearing protagonist, who bravely crosses class boundaries in her enthralling search for peace. Readers will find a home in Jones’s razor-sharp portraits of family life.”
—Hirsh Sawhney, author of South Haven

“Jones’ novel opens with the recovery of a sunken statue off the Bombay coast in 1640. Representing Stella Maris, the Virgin Mary as celestial queen, it stands at the center of a small Catholic community, a legacy of the Portuguese. Jones moves swiftly into the modern era, beginning in the late 1970s with a distracted historian emeritus, Francis Almeida, now sagging into an unfulfilling retirement, lost in his archives while missing his children and grandchildren, who are scattered around the globe. Well into the narrative, as Jones carefully rounds out her characters, Almeida runs his bicycle into an 8-year-old girl, Celia D’Mello. Celia suffers a broken arm, but that’s less painful than the loss of one of the two shoes she has. Swept under the wing of the distracted professor and his loving wife, Celia becomes a familiar in the comfortable Almeida home, a sharp contrast to that of her impoverished but aspirational family. Time passes, and with it come changes: Celia grows up, marries, and suffers a string of calamities, one foreshadowed at the very start of the book. Meanwhile, Almeida suffers, a bit more each day, from dementia, vaguely recalling at first that Celia “was the village child who had once pitched into his bicycle—­he could never remember the girl’s name,” eventually forgetting the names of his family. Jones writes with extraordinary empathy for her characters and their unhappy fates, peppering her prose with sharply observed aphorisms: “This was what the world did: press in on you with its bad-news this and so-sad that, snatch away what little time you had to see to your own affairs, fill your head with pictures you wished you’d never seen.” That’s­ just so, but her characters endure as best they can, and mostly with admirable dignity. Steeped in tragedy, but beautifully, memorably, and soulfully told.” —Kirkus

“A heartwarming and lively story wrapped up in an ode to one of the world’s most vibrant cities.” —Booklist

NALINI JONES is the author of a story collection, What You Call Winter. Her writing has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, Guernica, Elle India, Scroll, and numerous other publications in the U.S. and India. She has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship, among other honors, and her short story “Tiger” was selected for O. Henry and Pushcart prizes. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, daughters, and dogs, and teaches at Fairfield University.

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