On February 18, 2025, we hosted the Giller Book Club with Deepa Rajagopalan and Sindya Bhanoo for the Giller Book Club. Deep is the author of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM which was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. Sindya is the author of SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE.

About PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, published by House of Anansi Press:
An underappreciated coffee shop server haunted by her past attracts thousands of followers on social media with her peacock jewellery. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequity quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. And a foster child, orphaned in an accident directly attributable to climate change, brings down her foster father, an oil lobbyist, in spectacular fashion.

With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, the fourteen stunning stories in Peacocks of Instagram explore what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home.

About SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE, published by Penguin Random House Canada:
These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner.

Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart.

In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In “No. 16 Model House Road,” a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In “Nature Exchange,” a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In “A Life in America,” a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students.

Sindya Bhanoo’s haunting stories show us how immigrants’ paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.

Please visit gillerprize.ca/giller-book-club to learn about upcoming book clubs.