Sharp Insights

In the spring of 2013, Cormorant Books published The Family Took Shape, Shashi Bhat’s first novel. Indebted to Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, from 1971, it chronicles Mira Acharya’s life in the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill, from her sixth birthday to her marriage, as she confronts the hopes and traumas of being part of an immigrant family. A finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the novel elevated Bhat’s profile, heralding a new writer who relays her Hindu heritage without compromising her indebtedness to the literary worlds of Canada.

Eight years later, McClelland & Stewart published Bhat’s second novel, The Most Precious Substance on Earth, a first-person account of a young woman named Nina from her days as a high school student to her career as a high school teacher in Halifax. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, that novel brought further attention to Bhat and her ability to...