A savvy former street child working at a law office in Mumbai fights for redemption and a
chance to live life on her own terms in this smart haunting and compulsively readable” (Amy
Jones author of We’re All in This Together) debut novel about fortune and survival. A
heartbreaking yet hopeful story about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of
insurmountable odds.”—Etaf Rum New York Times bestselling author of A Woman Is No ManWith a
sharp wit and sharper tongue twenty-three-year old Rakhi Kumar is nobody’s fool. Sure she
lives alone in a slum and works as a lowly office assistant for the renowned lawyer Gauri
Verma who gave her a fresh start. But she’s come a long way from her childhood on the streets
of Mumbai. Most important she’s busy enough to distract herself from the nightmares of a
grisly childhood incident that led to the disappearance of her best friend. Fiercely
intelligent Rakhi could be doing so much more than making chai but she allows herself to be
underestimated by her colleagues at Justice For All Gauri’s cash-strapped rights law office.
These days it’s becoming harder for Rakhi to keep her head down as Gauri desperately tries to
save her organization by recruiting former Bollywood actress and infamous nineties thong girl ”
Rubina Mansoor to be their celebrity ambassador. But not all money is good money. Convincing
Gauri to make increasingly brash moves Rubina demands an internship for a young family friend
Harvard-bound graduate student Alex Lalwani-Diamond. An ambitious naïve rich kid with a
savior complex Alex persuades Rakhi to show him the real India.” In exchange he’ll do
something to further Rakhi’s dreams in a transaction that seems harmless at first. As old
guilt and new aspirations collide everything Rakhi once knew to be true is set ablaze. And as
the stakes mount she will come face-to-face with the difficult choices and moral compromises
one must make in pursuit of self-preservation and ultimately survival. Such Big Dreams is a
moving smart and arrestingly clever look at the cost of reclaiming one’s story.
