About Me
Lana Sabarwal is a novelist, an economist, and a devoted Agatha Christie disciple. Her debut psychological mystery: Maya, Dead and Dreaming, will be out in June 2025. It is a satisfying whodunnit that explores complex themes, including, how useful gossip can be; how we are unreliable narrators of our own lives; and what happens when women’s self-discovery collides with dysfunctional families and tight-knit communities?
Lana’s day job is in international development, where she writes about education and gender issues across the world. Her work has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times and covered by global media. Lana grew up in India. She lives in Washington DC and within the pages of her favorite books.
Maya, Dead & Dreaming
A cozy small town.
A fiery precocious girl.
A drizzly summer evening.
A chilling death that makes no sense at all.
Fourteen years later, its 1952. Munna Dhingra, a quiet immigrant, has made a lonely – but safe – life for herself after the traumatic death of her childhood friend. When she receives an anonymous letter that reads “Why Maya had to Die,” her world explodes again.
Munna has been hiding a secret about Maya’s death – a secret she herself doesn’t quite understand. Now, the eerie letter has pushed all her buried disquiet to the surface. But why now? Why her? Does Munna know something deeper, more consequential, without even being aware of it? What is her shadowy subconscious trying to tell her?
Haunted by guilt and desperate to prevent more deaths, she befriends Karenina – a fiendishly brilliant psychoanalyst with the uncanny ability to unearth dark secrets from the most lighthearted conversations. With only snippets of gossip and Munna’s broken memories to guide them, Munna and Karenina unravel a web of jealousy, betrayal, and forbidden relationships within the tight-knit town that ferociously guards its veneer of domestic tranquility.
But every secret uncovered leads to more questions and every step forward heightens a sense of encroaching dread. Will they ever really find out . . . why Maya had to die?
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