The first sentence of any written piece really gets you thinking. For a millisecond, it lurks around in your head and forces you to ask — 'Do I really even want to read the second sentence?' Leah Franqui, in her latest book Mother Land (William Morrow, HarperCollins) seamlessly encapsulates the plot in the first sentence: "When her mother-in-law came to ruin her life, Rachel Meyer arrived at a conclusion that she would never, afterward, be swayed from: namely, that whole thing that was entirely her own fault."

Rachel Meyer, here, is an American who has moved to Mumbai with her husband Dhruv, who hails from Kolkata. She has never visited India before and now, has to make it her home with an apartment in Bandra Reclamation. It is a big change and just as Meyer has begun to process and grasp it, her mother-in-law, Swati, shows up at the doorstep unannounced, separated from her husband and here to live with the couple forever. But this is not the television soap opera you'd imagine it to be. It's as much about two women building a home as much as trying to understand, from each other, what makes it one.