The Charterhouse of Padma

Two South Asian professors, both named P, unearth shocking secrets about the men they love and question the lives they chose.

P is writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. She's a translator and professor, married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, she discovers a secret about him, one that upends her understanding of their relationship and their marriage. In the gulf of their widening estrangement, P imagines a double, someone very like herself but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun...

Now we meet another "P" a novelist, also writing about chartreuse. She's married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It's her second marriage--the first fell apart when she discovered a secret about her then-husband. This P is abraded, exhausted, and enraged: by racial microaggressions, by structural obstacles, by the ways her husband's reaction to her own overdue career success is challenging their marriage. Granted stillness by the pandemic, though, this P rediscovers joy and hope in her relationship.

Eventually, each woman is led by her essay to the Chartreuse Mountains, the region made famous by the monks and their secret elixir.

The Charterhouse of Padma is full of delicious secrets, revelations, and sharply observed truths about what is to be brown, a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist. Exhilarating, electrifying, charged with incisive intellect and humor, this is a novel for anyone who ever wondered how, and if, they ever chose the thing they love.