eShe Book Club: ‘The Sea Has the Answers’ by Shuma Raha – sign up to meet the author

We’re excited to announce that our eShe Book Club pick of the month for July 2026 is Shuma Raha’s new release The Sea Has the Answers (Niyogi Books).

A novel that traces an Indian wife’s reclamation of agency and self-love after her famous husband is accused in several #MeToo allegations, this is an empathetic, feminist story of resistance, autonomy, survival and hard-won selfhood in modern-day India.

The book shines a light on aspects of relationships left out of #MeToo conversations, including the fallout for families, the blind spots in ‘happy’ marriages, and the burden of retribution for someone else’s actions.

Interestingly, the narrative also explores the husband’s point of view, delving into the mindset of a powerful, entitled man stripped of his power by allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

The book navigates India’s post-#MeToo landscape by centering women’s voices and choices. The protagonist must question the foundations of her marriage, deal with the social and emotional repercussions of discovering that her husband is a sex predator in his workplace, and then attempt to build a new life away from everything she took for granted in the past. In the process, she not only discovers her true self and claims her own desires, but also confronts systemic injustice.

Beyond personal liberation, the novel applies an analytical lens to socio-economic disparities and the politics of religion in today’s India. This interrogation of privilege and polarization elevates the narrative into a broader study of institutional power and complicity.

eShe Book Club discussion #4

eShe readers and Book Club members will get the opportunity to interact with Shuma Raha on Zoom and share their views about her new book. All discussions will be recorded and shared on our social-media pages, including as a podcast.

Date: 25 July 2026, Saturday
Time: 7.30 am PST / 10.30 am EST / 3.30 pm UTC / 8 pm India

About the author

Shuma Raha is an acclaimed Delhi-based journalist, writer and novelist whose work moves between fiction, cultural criticism and sharp contemporary commentary. In the past, she has held senior editorial positions at The Telegraph and The Times of India and continues to write widely as a journalist and columnist, contributing to leading publications on gender, media, politics and culture. She is a founding member of South Asian Women in Media (SAWM), a network of women media professionals in the region.

She is the author of The Love Song of Maya K and Other Stories (Niyogi Books, 2018), a critically praised collection of short fiction, and The Swap (HarperCollins, 2019), a novel. This is her third work of fiction, marked by her characteristic subtle wit, psychological acuity and a sharp eye for human behavior.

About the book

When Urmimala Das opens her morning newspaper and finds her husband named as a workplace sexual predator, the ground beneath her ordered, upper-crust Kolkata life gives way entirely. Fleeing the wreckage of her marriage and the corrosive pity of Kolkata’s social circuit, Urmi retreats to Kinjalka, her grandfather’s crumbling seaside house on the Bay of Bengal, a house that smells of childhood and holds its own buried sadnesses, where she hopes to achieve a measure of calm.

As she grapples with her dilemmas about the future of her marriage, she finds herself rallying for justice for a rape survivor in her neighborhood and, unexpectedly, plunging into an affair with a much younger man.

The Sea Has the Answers (Niyogi Books, 2026) by Shuma Raha is the layered story of a woman’s search for self-realization and the rekindling of her sexuality after a massive personal betrayal. Urmi is no passive victim waiting to be rescued. She is a woman of intelligence, empathy and feminist conviction, and yet she chose not to see, because seeing would have cost her too much. Shuma Raha’s devastating novel is about that cost, and about what it takes to meet it honestly.

eShe Book Club is where we get together in a stimulating online space to discuss, share and spotlight books by contemporary 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! Click here.