Debut novel: Unspectacular

Mae Strand, twenty, is a compulsive liar and budding but reluctant Chicago vocalist whose mother’s mysterious prior life is starting to loom dangerously large over her own. Coerced into recording a studio album by entertainment lawyer Robert Koenid, Mae is forced to choose whether to pursue a singing career for influence, even fame — or for music’s intrinsic value, all while she crests adulthood with her independence at stake.

A few blocks away, Ajay Chadhana is offered a rare opportunity: skip a step in the software project management career he’s been building since his immigration from India... at the cost of severely hardening his heart. As he approaches thirty, Ajay must draw a line between the trappings of humorously banal corporate life, and his nighttime life as a session drummer — a crisis of sustainable self-care versus ambition and what it takes to survive in the U.S. in February 2024.

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Featuring six unique perspectives, rich in symbolism, and generous in levity, Unspectacular is a voice-driven novel that will appeal to consumers of music culture, psychological fiction, family stories, and Asian-American literature. Entertaining and concise — with a swift, gripping plot — Unspectacular is crafted for accessibility and shares as much pace and rhythm with television as with its bookshelfmates.

Published work

“Strangers: Cricket and the Passage of Time”— creative nonfiction, Vagabond City Lit, 2022

“After the Last Midtown Show” — journalistic first-person narrative, The Alternative, 2022