praise

Publisher’s Weekly

Jones’s scintillating debut traces the bonds between two families in a Catholic community outside Bombay across several decades. In 1978, Francis Almeida, a retired history professor, rides his bike from his Santa Clara suburb to the nearby fishing village of Varuna. While visiting a storied shrine, he has a chance encounter with Flora D’Mello, the wife of a fisherman, whose toddler, Celia, is sick with dengue fever. Several years later, when eight-year-old Celia is skipping school because her family cannot afford new shoes for her, Francis accidentally runs her over on his bike, breaking her arm. He takes her to his home to rest, which sparks the families’ long-running relationship. Francis’s wife, Essie, finds satisfaction in giving Celia hand-me-down clothes from her granddaughter, and in turn receives a better price on fish. Eventually, Celia marries, but her life takes a turn for the worse when she loses her mother and her first child within months of each other. As both families experience their share of heartbreaks and joys, Jones effectively underscores how chance encounters can tie a community together. Her approach never feels contrived, but instead evokes the fluid motion of real life. This satisfies.

Kirkus Reviews

Atmospheric, multigenerational novel that explores class lines, love, and death in modern India.

Jones’ novel opens with the recovery of a sunken statue off the Bombay coast in 1640. Representing Stella Maris, the Virgin Mary as celestial queen, it stands at the center of a small Catholic community, a legacy of the Portuguese. Jones moves swiftly into the modern era, beginning in the late 1970s with a distracted historian emeritus, Francis Almeida, now sagging into an unfulfilling retirement, lost in his archives while missing his children and grandchildren, who are scattered around the globe. Well into the narrative, as Jones carefully rounds out her characters, Almeida runs his bicycle into an 8-year-old girl, Celia D’Mello. Celia suffers a broken arm, but that’s less painful than the loss of one of the two shoes she has. Swept under the wing of the distracted professor and his loving wife, Celia becomes a familiar in the comfortable Almeida home, a sharp contrast to that of her impoverished but aspirational family. Time passes, and with it come changes: Celia grows up, marries, and suffers a string of calamities, one foreshadowed at the very start of the book. Meanwhile, Almeida suffers, a bit more each day, from dementia, vaguely recalling at first that Celia “was the village child who had once pitched into his bicycle—­he could never remember the girl’s name,” eventually forgetting the names of his family. Jones writes with extraordinary empathy for her characters and their unhappy fates, peppering her prose with sharply observed aphorisms: “This was what the world did: press in on you with its bad-news this and so-sad that, snatch away what little time you had to see to your own affairs, fill your head with pictures you wished you’d never seen.” That’s­ just so, but her characters endure as best they can, and mostly with admirable dignity.

Steeped in tragedy, but beautifully, memorably, and soulfully told.

Booklist

The Unbroken Coast
By Nalini Jones

Call it fate. Retired history professor Francis Almedia is riding around Mumbai on his bicycle, intent on learning the city's storied past, when Celia, a schoolgirl from a nearby fishing village, crashes into him. With two grown children living abroad, Francis and his wife, Essie, have been forging a life as empty-nesters. Essie’s kindness to Celia and her parents in the immediate aftermath of the crash binds the families together for years. In her debut novel, Jones (author of the story collection What You Call Winter) deftly describes how class shapes the intersections between the Almeidas and Celia’s family. They might all be Christians, and mutually fond, but they're aware of what divides them. The novel explores the history of the Portuguese imprint on the city, the Hindu-Muslim riots of the early 1990s, and the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS. Some of these ideas are not integrated tightly into the narrative, remaining patchy subplots. All told, though, this is a heartwarming and lively story wrapped up in an ode to one of the world’s most vibrant cities.

Apple Books

The Unbroken Coast

Family, memory, and shifting tides shape Nalini Jones’ quietly powerful debut novel, set in a Mumbai fishing village. On the night Francis Almeida becomes a grandfather, he pedals his bicycle through his quiet neighborhood, unaware he’s about to cross paths with a baby girl whose life will intertwine with his own. Years later, that same girl, Celia, crashes into his bike and winds up under the care of Francis and his wife, while her fisherman father scrambles to avoid debt collectors. With tradition colliding with the forces of modernization against the richly textured backdrop of 1980s Mumbai (then called Bombay), Jones captures the slow unraveling of Francis’ memory with heartbreaking subtlety. Celia’s coming-of-age story is equally potent, marked by both resilience and heartbreak. As each character seeks comfort in the other’s presence, their evolving connection forms the emotional core of this deeply felt story of connection, change, and the meaning of home.

Washington Post

The Unbroken Coast by Nalini Jones

Jones’s first novel (after the story collection What You Call Winter) is a multigenerational story set in India. It begins with an evocative prologue set in 1640 before springing ahead to Bombay in 1978, where we meet a retired history professor named Francis Almeida. On a lonely bicycle ride late at night, he comes upon a woman holding a baby and praying to a statue. It’s the first of several momentous encounters in a novel that moves forward to the mid-1990s in the lives of its characters — and its city, which comes to be called Mumbai.

Vanity Fair

The Unbroken Coast (Knopf), by Nalini Jones, takes its professor protagonist out of the classroom and the reader back in time. In a largely Catholic Bombay village, Celia, the young daughter of a fisherman, and Francis Almeida, historian emeritus, literally collide when she flees a street vendor grabbing for her crucifix and runs headlong into the path of his bike. Their lives unfurl over decades, Bombay becomes Mumbai, and though a dementia-ridden Almeida begins to lose his memories, his mark on Celia’s future remains. It turns out there’s life after teaching and still time to learn.