The Charterhouse of Padma

Two women, living in America’s heartland, unearth shocking secrets about the men they love and question the lives they chose.

P is on deadline. She should be translating. Instead, she’s writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. A literary translator in Arkansas (of all places), she’s married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, P discovers a secret about her husband, one that upends her understanding of her life’s trajectory. In the widening gulf between who she is and who she thought she might be, she imagines a double, someone very like her, but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun…

Now we meet another “P”: a novelist. She’s married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It’s a second marriage—her first fell apart when she came upon a secret concealed by her then-husband. This P is exhausted and enraged: by racial microaggressions, by structural obstacles, by her husband’s dubious responses to her ambitions. Then the pandemic falls and her new novel falters, along with everything else she (and everyone else) had planned. In this new stillness, though, she starts to see her marriage differently. And, unexpectedly, she begins an essay, about her favorite color: chartreuse.

The Charterhouse of Padma is full of delicious surprises, revelations, and sharply observed truths about what is to be brown, a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist. Exhilarating, electrifying, charged with incisive intellect and humor, this is a novel for anyone who ever wondered how, or if, they ever chose the thing they love.