FOR THE BLESSING OF JUPITER AND VENUS
AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE BOOKS/EBOOKS ARE SOLD
A debut novel by Varun Gauri
Winner of the 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Prize
Washington Writers’ Publishing House
Publication date: October 8, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-941551-42-4/distributed by Ingram/now available
An exuberant debut that is as bitingly funny as it is wise. – Tania James, author of Loot
Varun Gauri captures the travails of a modern young Indian couple who find love the old-fashioned way, to the surprise of their families. The couple struggles with scheming relatives. Small-town politics. Real estate deals. Nationalist agendas. What could possibly go wrong? For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus takes us into the heart of the Indian diaspora of suburban Ohio. It is a delightful comedy of manners that poses the question of whether every marriage is, in the final analysis, an arrangement. – Susan Coll, author of Real Life and Other Fictions and former president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation
For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is luminous, a novel brimming with heart and humor and characters so richly imagined they feel like family. – Bret Anthony Johnston, Director of the Michener Center for Writers and author of the novel We Burn Daylight
This is an achingly intimate, irreverent novel about trying to find love in a marriage, while failing to fit into an immigrant community filled with social anxiety and unrealistic aspirations. – Leeya Mehta, Director of the Alan Cheuse Center
Varun Gauri deftly explores the meaning of commitment, the elusiveness of self-knowledge, the stubbornness of hope. For the Blessing of Jupiter and Venusis a comic, heartbreaking gem. – Kathleen Wheaton, author of Aliens and Other Stories and 2024-2026 Stegner Fellow
Disillusioned with modern romance, globe-trotting Meena tries an arranged marriage with Avi, an aspiring politician in Ohio. But when Avi’s political opponent launches racist attacks, Meena and Avi are forced to defend their immigrant community, which narrowly understands its own traditions, and protect their increasingly shaky relationship. This is an intimate, funny, and heartbreaking novel about small-town America and the politics of marriage.
The opening sentences of this absorbing, immersive novel, told in alternating points of view from Meena and Avi, sets the tone:
MEENA PUSHED ASIDE HER VEIL. The gold bangles, heavy on her wrists, slid and clinked. She feared the audience would find the gesture graceless and clumsy, but she had to see his eyes. She would, in moments, be the wife of this man in the groom’s headdress. Maybe she already was his wife. The Vedic ceremony, hours of venerable ritual, had no vows, no exchange of rings, no single moment when choice, her will, exercised its prerogatives….
Readers of literary fiction and upmarket fiction book clubs will want to engage with Varun Gauri’s debut novel For the Blessings of Venus and Jupiter.
Varun Gauri was born in India and raised in the American Midwest. After studying philosophy in college and public policy in graduate school, he worked for more than two decades on global poverty and human rights, publishing academic articles and books on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. His short fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He was a Summer Writer-in-Residence at Washington, DC’s The Inner Loop. For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is his first novel.