In a society governed by strict marriage rules and the dictates of the Khap, Jugni knows love is not an option. Her beloved uncle, whose unspoken favourite she has always been, will die if he ever learns of her betrayal of family honour; her brothers, her grandmother who has brought her up, their social standing in the village, everything would be lost and she could end up a corpse hanging from a tree. She cannot - and must not - meet Raakha again. And yet...and yet...Set in the Rohtak Division of the erstwhile Punjab province in the year 1909 - but as relevant today as a hundred years ago - Come, Before Evening Falls, paints a poignant picture of a young Jat girl torn between family loyalty and the undeniable impulse of love as compelling as it is doomed.

In 1953, on a remote island in South Korea, a young boy stows away on the ferry that is carrying his older brother and sister-in-law to the mainland. Fifty-two years later, Han Hyun-kyu is on a plane back to Korea, leaving behind his wife and grown children in America. It is his daughter, Jane — a war photographer recently injured in a bombing in Baghdad and forced to return to New York — who journeys to find him in the South Korean town where his brothers have settled. Here, father and daughter take refuge from their demons, unearth passions, and, in the wake of tragedy, each discover something deeper and more enduring than they'd imagined possible.

Long for This World is a pointillist triumph - depicting whole worlds through the details of a carefully prepared meal or a dark childhood memory. But Chung is also working on a massive scale, effortlessly moving between domestic intimacies and the global stage—Iraq, Paris, Darfur, Syria—to illuminate the relationship between troubled world affairs and personal devastation. The result is a profound portrayal of the human experience, both large and small. Long for This World establishes Sonya Chung as a thrilling new voice in fiction.

Seven-year-old Parvati's perfect world came crashing down the night the bomb fell on her house and she lost her mother and grandmother. Her father, an army officer deployed in Kashmir during the '71 war, also went missing that night. Orphaned overnight, Parvati left Ambala Cantt to live with her aunt's family. Now, twenty years later, she has returned to 169, The Mall to exorcize the ghosts of the past. While trying to find out what happened on that fateful night Parvati experiences the familiarity and warmth of life in a small cantonment—impromptu picnics, polo matches, husbands' nights. But she also uncovers deep secrets and a web of lies that will forever alter the course of her life.

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.

The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to a baby girl. But in a culture that favors sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son.

Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to adopt a child after making the wrenching discovery that she will never have one of her own. When she and her husband, Krishnan, see a photo of the baby with the gold-flecked eyes from a Mumbai orphanage, they are overwhelmed with emotion. Somer knows life will change with the adoption but is convinced that the love they already feel will overcome all obstacles.

Interweaving the stories of Kavita, Somer, and the child that binds both of their destinies, Secret Daughter poignantly explores the emotional terrain of motherhood, loss, identity, and love, as witnessed through the lives of two families—one Indian, one American—and the child that indelibly connects them.