At twenty-nine, Lila is a rising star book editor in Brooklyn when she learns that she has inherited her family’s enormous ancestral home. The catch? It's in Kolkata, and full to the rafters with all her relatives and family secrets.

It is the summer of 2015, and Lila De is on the verge of a breakthrough in her career at a prestigious New York publishing house. But when she gets a call from her mother in India, informing her that her grandfather has left his house to Lila in his will, it falls to her not just to manage the estate but also to confront the legacy of a complicated extended family that she thought she left behind sixteen years ago.

Back in Kolkata, Lila reunites with her mother after a decade of estrangement, and then there are her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom still live on different floors of the house, all of whom resent her sudden inheritance. To make matters more complicated, her first boyfriend seeks her out when she arrives, and back in the States her star author— and occasional lover— is suddenly determined to make things more serious.

As Lila tries to come to terms with both past and present, long-suppressed secrets from her family emerge, culminating in an act of shocking violence, and she must finally reckon with her inherited custom of keeping everything under the surface.