Jacket! Draft! Trilogy!

I wrote Book Uncle and Me without a thought about who it might be for. I wrote it because the story kept scratching at the inside of my brain and wouldn't leave me alone. It was originally published by Scholastic India. I never thought I would ever write a sequel.

Only a couple of years ago, when I was doing a zoom presentation during the Covid years, a child in the audience asked, "Is there going to be a second book?” I didn't have a coherent answer at the time, but the question stayed with me.

Now there is a Book 2—titled Birds on the Brain. It will be out in August. I wish I had thought to ask that child's name so I could thank her properly. Now the book is written, edited, copyedited, and wonderfully illustrated by Julianna Swaney and I find myself in that difficult, tense space of waiting for the first reviews and just hoping that someone will get what I was trying to convey.

Thankfully, I also find myself working on Book 3 of what is going to be a trilogy—the Book Uncle trilogy. This has taken years. These characters have come home to live with me for the long haul.

Can I manage to make a group of activist kids in an imaginary South Indian city stay relevant? No time for this kind of self-obsessed pondering. I have yet to settle on the final sentence on which to land the story. I have spent months revelling in chapters that let me glimpse only what happens next and maybe a ghost of what is yet to come. I have felt as inept at judging plot turns and balancing narrative and dialogue as if I were a beginning writer all over again. There’s a peculiar kind of joy in that repeated experience of newness. Every book teaches me only how to write that one.

By next year, there will be three Book Uncle books. Three times the joy of writing the first one. How did I get so lucky?