Alka Joshi’s Best-Seller
The Henna Artist was truly a labor of love for Pacific Grove-based Alka Joshi. It took roughly a decade of writing and rewriting, something like 30 drafts in all, for her to complete her debut novel. But really it started decades earlier, in Joshi’s 1950s childhood in Rajasthan, India, where she absorbed the details that eventually came to life in her book. Beyond that, it’s the story of a woman who stands up for herself and goes against the grain, in a time and culture when that is incomprehensible, and the main character, Lakshmi, is based loosely on Joshi’s late mother. “This is a story about women, and the agency women try to find with whatever limited boundaries they are allowed to exist within,” Joshi says. That message resonated with readers – including Reese Witherspoon, who chose The Henna Artist for her book club, and helped land the 2020 book on the New York Times best-seller list. Joshi has already released a sequel, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, and a TV adaptation is in the works.