Backshadow - Julie Mann

Some women keep secrets — some are kept by their secrets.

Pinned in India, Japan, and America, BACKSHADOW is the story of three women from three very different worlds. Until chance brings them together in a San Francisco college creative writing class, and they tentatively begin what seems an unlikely friendship.

Gregory is a hard-edged cynic with a gender-bending name and a load of emotional baggage, much of which happens to be tied to a man she’s working to forget—her daddy. But being free of him isn’t going to be easy, not after what she’s done.

Aneeta is a grey-eyed beauty born into Delhi privilege. But at the age of only thirteen she is robbed of the one thing she can never get back. And years later her dark truth becomes the catalyst that sees her exiled as a bride to America, traded from one nightmare into another.

Kameko is a modern Tokyo woman reluctantly drawn by duty into a traditional marriage. But as she struggles to fulfill an age-old feminine ideal half a world away from Japan, an accidental discovery devastates her fragile equilibrium.

By turns heartbreaking and hopeful, BACKSHADOW crosses continents and cultures to powerfully and poignantly consider some of the most provocative and often stigmatizing issues affecting women in the world today.