Book of the Month: ‘Intemperance’ by Sonora Jha – join eShe Book Club and meet the author

We are super-excited to announce the launch of the eShe Book Club!

This is where we get together in a stimulating online space to discuss, share and spotlight books by South Asian women writers. Join our Discord group (app login required), participate with book suggestions, share your views and reviews, promote your own writing, or just drop in for book recommendations! More details here.

Each month we will also pick one Book of the Month, and will host the author for an online discussion. Book Club members and eShe readers can sign up to interact with the author in our Zoom discussion.

Our pick of the month for February 2026 and for our first Book Club discussion is – ta da! – Sonora Jha’s novel, Intemperance!

eShe Book Club discussion #1

Readers and members will get the opportunity to interact with Sonora Jha and share their views about her novel, Intemperance. All discussions will be recorded and shared on our social-media pages, including as a podcast (yup, smile and sit up!).

Date: 28 February 2026
Time: 7.00 am PST / 10.00 am EST / 3 pm UTC / 8.30 pm India

Sonora Jha, PhD, writes at the fault lines where gender, power, age and desire press against one another until something shifts. Author of four books, she came to literature after a career in journalism in India and Singapore, an experience that sharpened her attentiveness to social performance and institutional power. That dual grounding in reportage and analysis continues to shape her fiction and nonfiction alike.

Jha’s work has received wide critical recognition. Her novel The Laughter (2023) won the 2024 Washington State Book Award for Fiction and the AutHer Award for Fiction; it was longlisted for the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New Yorker, NPR and others.

Her memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son: A Memoir and Manifesto (2021) expanded her feminist inquiry into the intimate terrain of parenting and masculinity, and has since been translated into Spanish, Portuguese and German. Her debut novel, Foreign (2013), was a finalist for both the Shakti Bhatt Prize and the Hindu Prize and was longlisted for the DSC Prize.

A professor at Seattle University, Jha was a speaker at eShe’s South Asia Union Summit Led by Women, where she spoke about gender equality and social justice in South Asia. She lives in Seattle, a city that frequently surfaces in her work as a site of migration, reinvention and contested belonging.

Jha’s home city in fact, serves as the site of her latest novel, Intemperance, which released in October 2025 in India and has earned rave reviews.

The novel begins with an unnamed protagonist, with two husbands in her past, announcing that she will celebrate her 55th birthday by holding a swayamvar. Drawn from an ancient Indian custom in which suitors compete for a bride, the ritual is relocated to an American town and claimed by a woman who knows exactly how ridiculous, and how dangerous, this will appear.

A renowned intellectual who once declared herself “past such petty matters as love”, the protagonist understands the risk she is courting. She proceeds anyway. Her self-esteem and sexual appetite remain defiantly intact even as her body bears the marks of disability, fading beauty and an unapologetic fondness for cake. 

Intemperance refuses the lie that desire should diminish neatly with age, or that dignity requires silence. The novel is less interested in romance than in exposure – of cultural scripts, social discomfort and the peculiar cruelty reserved for women who want too much, too late.

Jha does not sentimentalise the body or soften its changes; she insists that longing can coexist with decline, humour and excess. The swayamvar becomes a public act of rebellion, turning private desire into spectacle. In doing so, the novel asks a simple, unsettling question: what if a woman refused to age into invisibility and instead made a party of it?