When Nalini Jones, a writer and assistant professor of English in the John Charles Meditz College of Arts and Sciences, began working on her latest book, she found herself returning to a world she thought she had left behind in her previous short story collection, What You Call Winter (Knopf, 2007).
“The book began with one of the families I’d written about in stories for my first collection, What You Call Winter," said Jones. "I couldn’t outrun my curiosity about those characters, so I began to think of ways to learn more about them.”
Her first novel, The Unbroken Coast, published in August 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf, opens in Bombay on the night Professor Francis Almeida’s granddaughter is born in America. Riding his bicycle through his quiet Catholic neighborhood in Bombay, he passes a few streets away into the heart of a Koli fishing village, where he encounters a young mother praying for her baby daughter at the shrine of Our Lady of Navigators. Nearly a decade later, an accident brings the two families together, setting the stage for an unexpected connection.
Jones begins her writing process with characters—individuals whose lives differ from her own. "In this novel, I was drawn to characters whom the world might overlook: an elderly man, a young girl, a servant. Just that impulse created certain narrative possibilities. And eventually I realized I was interested in the different ways that they all rely on stories in their lives," she said.
Jones's work has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, Guernica, Elle India, Scroll, and numerous other publications in both the U.S. and India. She has contributed to anthologies exploring politics, music, and family, including AIDS Sutra, a landmark collection about communities affected by HIV.
Jones graduated from Amherst College and received her MFA from Columbia University. She joined Fairfield University's English department in 2024, where she teaches English at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level in the MFA in Creative Writing program.
