A powerful story about the quiet devastations of colonialism and the price of belonging.

When eighteen-year-old Shiv Advani is handpicked by Mahatma Gandhi to study law in England and return as a leader of a liberated India, he leaves home reluctantly—newly and hastily betrothed, a wife he barely knows already carrying their child, and a life laid out for him by duty rather than desire.

But London upends everything. Drawn in and repelled in equal measure, Shiv enters a world shaped by the Empire. Its culture, privilege, and seductive freedoms slowly pull him away from the mission he came for as the people Shiv sought to be liberated from become the people he desperately wants to be a part of. As he trains at the Inns of Court and begins to carve out a new life, the distance between his two homes widens. Soon he is caught between loyalty and longing, tradition and transformation, two homelands, two identities, and two futures. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.

Set against the turbulence of India’s freedom movement, The English Problem is a lyrical, intimate, and politically resonant novel of a young man and a young nation, struggling to define themselves.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:

“A dynamic character portrait as well as a nuanced depiction of India’s struggles against British rule. It’s a triumph.” — Publishers Weekly

“From these opening lines, Beena Kamlani introduces the primary conflict of her debut novel, The English Problem: the tension between the home we are from and the home we have chosen. . . . Kamlani’s writing vividly brings us into Shiv’s experience through his senses.” — BookPage

“[A]n assured work of historical fiction . . . Shiv, an engaging, torn, and complicated figure, centers Kamlani’s gripping and revealing account of London’s creative circle, the crimes of colonialism, and the slow march to India’s independence.”— Booklist

“Beena Kamlani’s voice is lyrical and poetic; her style embracing, haunting, inspiring. The novel is a beautifully realized story about colonialism and about love across racial, gender, and economic barriers in a toxic time.”— Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols. 1–3

“What a grand, sweeping, mesmerizing book this is: a richly detailed, politically profound story of love, of migration, of individuals caught up in the great convulsions of history. Wow.” — Joseph O’Neill, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Netherland<