I’m pleased to share that both of my published novels, What the Gate First Knew and What the Gate Remembers, have received Second Place at The BookFest Awards, Fall 2026, in Historical – Multi-Period Family Saga.
These are the first two books in The Gate of Belonging, a planned five-book literary series. Having both recognized together makes this a particularly meaningful milestone in my journey as a novelist.
The official award listings are here:
The questions behind these books have been with me for much longer than the books themselves. What happens to our idea of home when we leave the place that first gave it meaning? What do our children inherit from that departure? And how much of a family’s history lives in the ordinary things: a Sunday phone call, a familiar recipe, a notebook, a house someone still looks after?
What the Gate First Knew follows Abir Das from his childhood behind a green gate in Kolkata into a life across Berlin and Boston. His marriage to Harleen Kaur, a Punjabi architect from Delhi, becomes part of the continuing work of building a home across countries, languages, and family expectations.
What the Gate Remembers turns toward the next generation. Abir and Harleen’s children, Arin and Mira, inherit a family already shaped by migration. When a structural crack threatens the family home in Kolkata, questions about the building become questions about memory, responsibility, and what each generation chooses to carry forward.
The characters and their lives are fictional. The emotional questions draw on my own experience of growing up in India and building a career and family across Europe and the United States. Years spent in technology have taught me to think about how things are built. Writing these novels has given me another way to explore that question—through marriages, families, identities, and the places we call home.
The family-saga category feels especially fitting because the conversation between generations is central to both books. One person’s decision to leave becomes part of another person’s inheritance. What feels like opportunity from one side can feel like absence from the other.
Thank you to The BookFest judges for recognizing both novels, and to everyone who has read, reviewed, recommended, or shared them. For an author publishing his first novels, each of those acts matters.
You can explore both books, watch their trailers, and find links to paperback and eBook editions on The Gate of Belonging books page.
There are more stories to come through the gate. I’m grateful these first two have begun finding their readers.
