EVERY HAPPINESS
Every Happiness is a dazzling debut that explores the ties that bind two women across decades and continents despite rivalry, class difference, and the conflicting needs of family and self.
Deepa and Ruchi are 12 years old when they meet at their Catholic school in India, but their connection is swift and lasting. As the two girls grow up and face their families’ expectations and the limits of their ambitions, their friendship is marked by intimacy, jealousy, and suppressed desire.
When, in their twenties, Deepa marries a doctor and moves from India to the suburbs of Connecticut,
Every Happiness is a dazzling debut that explores the ties that bind two women across decades and continents despite rivalry, class difference, and the conflicting needs of family and self.
Deepa and Ruchi are 12 years old when they meet at their Catholic school in India, but their connection is swift and lasting. As the two girls grow up and face their families’ expectations and the limits of their ambitions, their friendship is marked by intimacy, jealousy, and suppressed desire.
When, in their twenties, Deepa marries a doctor and moves from India to the suburbs of Connecticut, Ruchi quickly finds an engineer bound for the same state and follows her friend across the world. But life in the United States is different than either woman expects. Deepa’s daughter seeks affection Deepa refuses to give, and Ruchi’s son resists her smothering care. At the same time, Deepa and Ruchi find their closeness tested by a growing class disparity, competing family needs, and the differences in their desires. Ultimately, when Ruchi discovers a dangerous secret about Deepa’s husband’s wealth, both women are forced to weigh the tangled bonds of their friendship with their lives, and their families’, in the burgeoning Indian American community.
“Moving and unforgettable” (Kimberly King Parsons), Every Happiness explores the slippery edges of a lifelong relationship, and the invisible threads that bind us, sometimes painfully, to those we love most.
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Hardcover
- February 2026
- 320 Pages
- 9781639733002
Buy the Book
$28.99
About Reena Shah
Reena Shah is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has been featured in the Masters Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, BBC, the American Prospect, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among other publications. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, Millay Arts, Tin House, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Cuttyhunk Island Residency, and the Fulbright Foundation. She received an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers, where she won the Keene Prize for Literature. For many years she was a kathak dancer in New York and India. She now lives on Roosevelt Island, NY with her family and teaches in a public school.
Praise
“A bold and moving novel with great emotional intricacy and keen attention to moral predicaments. It marks the arrival of a radiant new voice unafraid to examine love in all its forms, from the most stifling to the most freeing.” —Megha Majumdar, author of the 2025 National Book Award finalist A Guardian and a Thief
“Shah’s lush prose and sensitive exploration of class, culture, and the evolving nature of female friendship will appeal to fans of Thrity Umrigar, Kamila Shamsie, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” —Booklist, starred review
“I don’t think I have ever missed a set of novel characters more: astonishingly alive, lovable, aggravating, real. Shah writes beautifully about every sort of love: filial, parental, marital, and above all the longing and vivid pettiness and durable, complicated love between women over decades.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway
“Shah deftly delivers a story full of parallelisms and contrasts in which the prickly humanity of her main characters is never softened.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“One of the most arresting and rewarding novels I’ve read in years. Reena Shah is a writer of immense gifts.” —Bret Anthony Johnston, author of We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This
“Shah deftly delivers a story full of parallelisms and contrasts in which the prickly humanity of her main characters is never softened.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Discussion Questions
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In the beginning of the novel, the author writes, “What did it mean to know a person? Really know them on the inside? It was an impossible thing, a person; one could live close to your heart and remain a riddle.” Do you think friends, partners, and families can ever really know each other? What do you think the author means here by “knowing someone”?
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Deepa often makes Ruchi feel uncertain by what she says or how she reacts to Ruchi. How did this dynamic make you feel while reading the novel? Did their dynamic change as they went through life? Why or why not?
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When Deepa and Ruchi play that they will both marry the made- up husband Anil, what do you think they were trying to say to each other about their true desires? Do you think they could have expressed their desires differently if they had been born in a different time or place?
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Ruchi and Deepa experience immigration to the United States very differently. What is similar about their experiences? What is different? What is this novel saying about the American Dream? What is it saying about belonging?
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Throughout the novel, both Ruchi and Deepa’s desires remain largely unnamed and unspoken. But their desires are also at the edges of so many passages, a constant presence in their lifelong friendship and throughout the story. How did the author accomplish this in the prose?
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What did you think about the scene where Moksh reveals his bruised ribs in the bathroom at the party? Did you understand what Moksh was struggling with at this point in the novel? Or did understanding come to you earlier or later in the novel?
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In the scene where Ruchi is feeding young Moksh a Fluff and peanut butter sandwich, she judges American parents “who let their children cry in dark rooms alone,” but by trying to force Moksh to eat, she is making his struggles with food more difficult. How does food get tied up with love in this novel? What is another example of food playing a central role in a character’s actions?
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Most of the characters are affected by their relationship with their mothers. How are Deepa, Ruchi, Anu, and Moksh affected by how their mothers treated them? How do those relationships play out in their adult lives, and in how the characters treat their own children?
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What did it mean at the end for Moksh and his father to share a meal of Ruchi’s cooking? Why did Moksh finally eat his fill?
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Why can’t Deepa accept her daughter’s family—her wife and children? Do you think if the novel continued, she would someday be able to? Or are they destined to forever remain unreconciled?