On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, her closest friend, Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Rachel Eliza was learning to exist without her, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Rachel Eliza realized that to survive her heartbreak, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day.

And so Rachel Eliza chronicles her seventeen years of friendship with Aisha. From the moment they met in a college library, she knew she had found a soul sister. Their life together was filled with music: they danced to records in their apartments and skipped from one sticky jazz bar to another. Sitting side-by-side at poetry circles, reading Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, marching through Harlem protesting lost Black lives, Rachel Eliza drew inspiration and strength from her friend. Together they learnt to embrace themselves, as writers, artists, and Black women.

Rachel Eliza interweaves this love story with another, that of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the depth of their connection. Celebrating the ways that these two extraordinary people have transformed her life, she reflects on the beauty and pain that come with opening oneself fully to love.

The people of Salt Point are afraid of the world beyond their rural town. Most of them are born, live and die never having gone more than twenty or thirty miles from houses that are crammed with generations of their families. But something shifts at the end of summer 1957. Change makes its way to Salt Point.

The Kindred sisters – Ezra and Cinthy – grew up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbours, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town, whose home is filled with spice-rubbed ribs and ground-shaking hugs. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful New England village perched high up on coastal bluffs.

But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbours, including Ezra’s best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way. And as the news from distant parts of the country fills with calls for freedom, equality, and justice for Black Americans, the white villagers of Salt Point begin to view the Kindreds and the Junketts as a threat to their way of life. Amidst escalating violence, prejudice, and fear, bold Ezra and watchful Cinthy must reach deep inside the wells of love they’ve built to commit great acts of heroism and grace on the path to survival.

In luminous, richly descriptive writing, Promise celebrates one family’s story of resistance. It’s a book that will break your heart – and then rebuild it with courage, hope, and love.

‘A novel so potent, one wonders if it’s secretly a magic spell’ Kiran Desai