Orphaned at birth, seventeen-year-old Korobi Roy has enjoyed a privileged childhood with her adoring grandparents in Kolkata. But she is troubled by the silence that surrounds her parents’ death and clings to her only inheritance from them: the unfinished love note she found hidden in her mother’s book of poetry. The young woman dreams of one day finding a love as powerful as her parents’, and it seems her wish has come true when she meets the charming Rajat, the only son of a high- profile business family. On the night of their engagement party, Korobi’s grandfather dies of a sudden heart attack. His death reveals the family’s financial problems as well as a dark secret. This secret will shatter Korobi’s sense of self and will take her out of her sheltered Kolkata life into a search, in the company of an attractive stranger, across America, a country that she finds at once dangerous, unwelcoming and alluring. What she discovers at the end will force her to make the most difficult choice of her life. No one tells such heart-stopping stories with as much color and emotion as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Oleander Girl is the writer at her very best.