In the Moonlit Kingdom By Aishwarya Jha

The winner of the 2024 Ram Nath Goenka Sahithya Samman for Fiction returns with a literary Gothic about a former film star, her estranged daughter and the stories families tell to survive.

Penguin Books will publish In the Moonlit Kingdom, the second novel by award-winning author Aishwarya Jha, in September 2026. At once a family saga, psychological mystery, and piercing social portrait, the novel turns a crumbling Himalayan manor into a living archive of love, violence, celebrity and denial.

In Munala, a remote mountain town where colonial legends and local gossip shape everyday life, the Chandra Singhs are treated as royalty. When family patriarch Indresh dies, his estranged daughter Meher returns after eleven years. A Vienna-based artist long denounced by her family and town for being angry, difficult, and unstable, she finds the manor sinking under debt, her brother scrambling to save it, and her mother Devyani–once one of Indian cinema’s most adored stars–still presiding over a carefully burnished family myth.

There, Meher discovers her father’s final bequest: an exquisite miniature Swiss house bearing the words “For my daughter.” As she traces its antecedents, private records, buried memories and the manor’s spectral past begins to converge. Her search forces her to confront the ghosts she has spent her life outrunning—ghosts that have shaped the trajectory of many lives, including her own—and the truths that have held the home together even as they have torn it apart.

Jha gives the mystery scale and bites through a chorus of formidable neighbours, servants, relatives, opportunists, and would-be biographers who turn Munala into witnesses, jury, and rumor mill. Their dynamic personalities and sometimes canny, sometimes macabre observations add layers of intrigue as the novel probes who is believed, who is condemned, and how beauty, motherhood, status, and family loyalty can disguise harm. Atmospheric yet propulsive, In the Moonlit Kingdom brings Indian Gothic into conversation with domestic drama and social satire, exploring intergenerational trauma, female celebrity, class, inheritance, heritage, and the commercial transformation of hill towns.

Its central question is as urgent as it is unsettling: when a family—and society—survive on either deifying women or stigmatizing them, can they survive the collision of memory and truth?

About The Author
Aishwarya Jha is an award-winning author, designer and entrepreneur from New Delhi. Her debut novel, The Scent of Fallen Stars, won the 2024 Ram Nath Goenka Sahithya Samman for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Bombay Literary Magazine, Scroll, The New Indian Express, an anthology at the University of Oxford and numerous international literary journals. A mentee of the Asian Women Writers programme, she has also written, directed and performed in one-act plays staged internationally. She is the co-founder of Indophile, an initiative promoting Indian culture and heritage, and lives in New Delhi with her family and an army of dogs.