Welcome to “First Chapters,” Cosmo’s column where we shine a spotlight on newer authors who you are definitely going to be obsessed with. And what better way for you to get to know them and their books than with an excerpt of their new release. This round, we’re highlighting Nayantara Roy’s Sisters of a Halved Heart, a new honest and compelling novel that follows two sisters after one of them does the unthinkable, leaving their relationship in pieces. As one returns to New York, they have to come to face the truth between what happened between them. Here’s some more info from Algonquin Books:

The electric story of two sisters and an unthinkable betrayal.

Mira Guhathakurta is a poetry editor at a distinguished literary magazine in New York, a dream job that has given her nearly everything she’s always wanted. And then she reconnects with Jack from college—kind, funny, intelligent Jack—and suddenly Mira feels as if she might have found her soulmate. They’ve woven their lives together so thoroughly; all that remains is for Jack to meet her family: her beloved father and dear sister Joy. But when Joy commits an unthinkable act of betrayal, the sisters are impossibly fractured and their father’s heart is broken. As the sisters navigate their tumultuous relationship and Mira starts over, it turns out that Joy isn’t the only one who has been—or continues to be—dishonest.

In a propulsive story of love and passion and the ultimate pull of family, Sisters of a Halved Heart examines the lengths we will go to in order to make our own narratives of love work out, the lies we tell ourselves, and the ways in which the truth, often right in front of you, can be impossible to see.

And you can get an exclusive look at this special book with an incredible sneak peek below! Just make sure to pre-order Sisters of a Halved Heartso you can find out what happens next when it's released on June 2, 2026!

Chapter 1

She was my half sister and through our lives, we bore this label. Half of our father. Halved by race— her blood half mine, her skin lighter (whiter, brighter?). We were confidants, bound by the secrets only we could know, and enemies, divided by the cracks and fissures in our father’s attentions. We were reluctant to share (sweets, a bedroom, life itself), and so close to the bones of our father’s face that you might do a double take at a photograph despite the eight years by which I was older. But Joy and I were in search of something that might turn us whole in each other’s presence, grateful to have been gifted even a portion of sisterhood. And so we strove to turn it into the real thing with an uneasy combination of best behavior and secret jealousies, devoid of the open chafing of other siblings. We were the chipped pieces of our family’s urn, bound by common traumas and absent mothers; you could tell where the fractures had been. In this manner, we were inseparable and learned to swim the same strokes, taste the same pleasures, our bodies and fashions a trick mirror of each other. It was natural therefore that the two of us learned to seek the same things, and what came to pass should have surprised no one, except that it nearly destroyed me.

It was raining, the morning I returned to New York, the early light piercing through a pale gray cloud cover, a soft blinding in my eyes despite the drizzle dotting the aircraft’s window, spotted snow and skyscraper blanketing the city below— an aerial homecoming. Somewhere in the city, Jack was waking up, his alarm bursting into Bach (Sonata in E Minor), his arms reaching for the covers, pulling them over his head. Soon he would swing his feet to the floor, willing himself to be awake and walk to the kitchen (yellow kettle, steel toaster, lactose-free milk, his ugly globe bar cart from the flea market on Broadway) as he started his day (chemex, steam, his breath on mine), inhabiting a life that held only my ghost.

From the airport I took a taxi to Lena’s house, chilled by the icy, wet weather, the cab driver in a temper because someone had broken his taillight an hour ago. Lena and Sebastian lived in a brownstone they had bought next to Prospect Park, a few blocks from the botanical garden. I would have liked to live as near them as possible, but nothing in their neighborhood, or for miles around, was affordable. Instead, I was forty minutes away, in the heart of Bushwick, above an Ecuadorian restaurant and a jazz club called Birdlore. In the photos, my apartment had looked charming, with wooden floors, a tiny second bedroom I could turn into an office, and a French window that got sun in the late mornings. It was not far from Bed-Stuy, where Lena and I had lived after college, not knowing how we might divide up the furniture and winter jackets we had shared for three years in student housing. We had met at Brown in a class on avian poetry taught by a professor we both hated for his small meannesses, Lena’s popularity creating bridges to social events that my shyness and lack of glamour might have prohibited otherwise. Like me, she had not known Jack well, but he had occasionally appeared on the periphery of her large social orbit. Lena had always been a precipitous force in my life. At her insistence, in my senior year, I finished a poem I had worked on all year. It was called “Evening Skin,” and the first draft had been written quickly, after a night that I had found difficult to forget. In revision, I had liked the simplicity of the poem’s structure, and Lena had convinced me it held more depth than I thought. Despite my reservations, giving in to her urging, I had submitted it to Brown’s college magazine.

By morning I mourn you,
Our shedding long past
In fickle light. Your senses come to
Word, breath, limb. I unpeel, last.
We nod, cool
As ice. You ask if I want to play pool
Tonight, as a thousand times before.
I eschew rapture and riptide for yore
Erasing all trace of liquid body. Drinking
Inhaling. Sweat and saliva surrogates for thinking.
Our acquaintance of sturdy years of leisure
Dissolved by a single call to pleasure.
A harsh noon. Clothed
Our colors no longer stark against the other.
To university and community and bro
Once more betrothed.

Five weeks later, it was published and received a maelstrom of praise; and then a year later, “Evening Skin” won me a prestigious award. For reasons I attributed to luck, timing, and the student body’s emotional state, the poem had touched a nerve on campus, after which word of mouth had carried it wider. The shock of my sudden (fleeting) fame was diluted by the confusion of being seen as a Promising Young Poet overnight. I put it down to fortune and spent the prize money on a writing desk and records and tried writing more poetry, but it was as if an artery had clogged. Soon after, I was commissioned to write a poem for an anthology. When I sent my verses in, I could almost taste the editor’s disappointment. Perhaps I could write something more like “Evening Skin”? He had made the inquiry, tapping his earlobe, as if in search of a missing beat.

After graduation, we went separate ways— Lena into publishing, while I tried to assess what I might be good at. We talked daily about our dreams and our friends, the state of the world and the state of our hearts, the movies and music we both loved and the frugal recipes we could afford to make. She had gone to work for one independent publisher after another, working her way up to editor. I landed first at a rare bookstore, shelving books and running the register and later, evaluating worn hardcovers, looking for flaws and markups. Then, I was an assistant editor at a tabloid, where I edited the scorching Letters to the Editor section and summarized the scoops and speculation published by other outlets each week. Eventually, and with relief, I applied for and got a position as a poetry editor at a small but beloved literary magazine called The Janus Review. Once a week, I taught a foundation class in poetry at the New School. That year, one afternoon, Lena went on a blind date and returned at one in the morning with Sebastian, a Mexican-American pediatrician with green eyes and the hint of a beer belly, who saw through her armor and had the ability to make us both laugh. I knew then that I would have to make sure Lena stayed in my life even if she gave herself up to a man.

As the cab pulled up, Lena opened the front door and came running down the stoop stairs through the gate, Gino hanging off one hip.

“Be careful, it’s slippery,” I said as the cab driver pulled out my suitcase.

I got out and threw open my arms, my purse sliding off my shoulder to my elbow. Gino smelled of sour milk and candy, his toddler arms pulling on my hair as I took him from Lena, enveloping them both.

“Good god, he’s a grown man,” I said into his fine, dark hair.

Lena’s face was wet with a mix of tears and rain as she pressed her cheek to mine, Gino fidgeting between us.

“Goddamn you, Mira,” she said.

“Stand,” said Gino, emphatic, pointing at the sidewalk with a tiny finger, but I held on to him, taking in his tan, flushed face, the many folds in his little arms and legs, their color that of a milky latte.

“This is Mira mashi, darling,” said Lena, stroking his head. “Mama loves her so much.”

I set Gino down and immediately, he ran back into the house.

“Be careful,” called Lena after him. “Sebbie, Gino’s run inside.”

She turned back to me.

“I’m glad you’re back. If you ever leave like that again, I’ll kill you.”

Inside, the house smelled of children and crayons and Bolognese, cushions everywhere, a large cat asleep by the radiator, height marks on the kitchen wall, the stamp of a family in every cranny. Seven years ago, Lena and Sebastian had had their twins, Mirabel and Alice. Four years later, Gino was in their lives. I was godmother to all three. I watched them throw peas at each other— Gino caught in the fray between his havoc-causing sisters as Lena tried to referee— and thought of the empty apartment that I hadn’t seen in person yet, a mere forty minutes away. I would be in the same city as them, this family I loved, and it sent a brief ripple of happiness through me.

“You look athletic, Mira,” said Sebastian.

“I can literally see a bicep,” said Lena, wiping red sauce off her neck.

Self-conscious, I shrugged. “I went running a lot in London. The office was in Canary Wharf so it was nice to run along the river. Got myself some dumbbells, too. Exercise was the only thing I didn’t want to do in a mask.”

“All that rain,” said Lena. “Runners get mowed down by traffic in London all the time.”

“Okay, mom,” I said. “I’ll wear all neon when I run in the rain here. Maybe you’ll come with me.”

“I have three children, Mira. You stop by here when you want some real exercise.”

Sebastian yawned, stretching his arms over his head. “Will you miss London? What made you want to leave? You’ll miss the pubs at least?”Sebastian grunted with longing.

“You’re such an anglophile, Seb,” said Lena, looking at her rumpled husband with affection. “He’d do so well living a quiet life in the English countryside.” Lena turned to me, her flaxen curls catching the light. She could go from harried, sweatpants-clad editor and mother to extraordinary in seconds. She was pretty to look at but there was something startling about her sweetness and the devotion with which she focused on people.

“I’d be the village doctor,” said Sebastian, pleased. “If I were you, Mira, I wouldn’t have left. England feels so much more ... real than America.” He rubbed the tips of his fingers together, as if feeling for texture.

I felt something constrict in my chest and make its way into the base of my throat. “It was time to come home,” I said after a pause.

Lena and Sebastian’s eyes softened together, interconnecting emotion and memory in the way that long-term couples did.

“How do you feel, M?” asked Lena, gentle above Gino’s clamor for more peas.

“About being back,” said Sebastian, his voice dropping as if we were talking about things that children should not be privy to.

I lifted a shoulder, trying to locate the answer in my knotted limbs. “I wasn’t going to disappear forever.”

After lunch, they let me fall asleep on the couch. I woke up with a start to an empty house and a note on the table.

Taking the twins to their recital— come by for dinner if you’re hungry after movers xx

The cat blinked at me as I pulled on my jacket, as if making note of an intruder in the spectacle of domestic happiness.

“I’m leaving,” I said to her.

Suitcase in hand, I took an umbrella from a stand by the door and pulled it shut behind me. But outside, it had stopped raining and Brooklyn was alight with a burst of afternoon sun, the snow melting into rivulets, bits of it still clean, sparkling in the light. I lifted my face to the sun, letting the warmth seep into me. It was a trick that I had learned in therapy, which might make one feel better if only for a moment. I had been lifting my face to the sun for almost five years. The walk from Lena’s house to the train station was only two minutes, made pleasant by the calm of the park’s green. From there, it was seven stops to City Hall, where I changed from the 5 to the J. Ten more stops to Jamaica Center, and finally, a fifteen minute walk to my new address on Palmetto. Even with my heavy suitcase and the subway stairs, it would not have occurred to me to take a taxi— every dollar in my life was accounted for. The apartment was too far from the increasingly white bar scene around Maria Hernandez Park to be trendy, and the friend who was leasing it to me had confessed that, despite the lack of street lighting and the three junkies who lived below the building, it was a mostly residential, dead area. As I turned the corner, I saw the mover’s truck outside a three-story building that looked like a house, just as it had in the photographs, a brief happiness coursing through my veins at the sight. At the van’s open back, two young men were lifting my small piano. I quickened my pace, suitcase trundling over the pavement.

“Be careful,” I said, out of breath as I stopped in front of the men.

Inches away from setting the instrument down in the slush, they stopped to stare at me.

“It’s maple. You can’t get it wet,” I said, a pinching in my ribs from the sudden rush of air.

Their eyes widened at my panic. I tried to smile.

“I’m Mira Guhathakurta,” I said. “Apartment Four. It’s got an elevator.”

In under three hours, Mitch and Ramin of the MakeAMove company assembled the parts of my renewed life. Shelves and books, my beloved ancient coffee maker with its miraculously unbroken glass carafe, the piano, a record player with an oak turntable I had found thrifting with Lena, and my father’s frayed Victorian velvet armchair. The objects of another life, now spread across bedroom and living room, as if I had lived in these rooms all along.

“No couch or kitchen stuff?” asked Ramin, stretching out a muscular, veined calf on the floor. I handed him one of the three coffees I had bought from the bodega around the corner.

“I got rid of almost everything when I moved to London a few years ago,” I said. “This”— I looked around— “was the stuff I kept in storage. The chair and piano were gifts. I didn’t want to sell them.”

“Good little neighborhood,” said Mitch, the taller of the two, bending to avoid the doorframe as the men readied to leave. “Not glamorous but it has character.” He made an emphatic fist in the air, intended to reassure me. “And you found yourself a solid spot.”

“There’s a great empanada stand around the corner,” said Ramin. “My girlfriend’s aunt lives across from it.”

“You’re going to like it here,” said Mitch. “But if you do move again, remember MakeAMove.”

For the first time, I realized they were brothers, an unmistakable resemblance in the way they grinned at me. I watched them drive off in the slush of the street, their easy banter having lifted me out of my own head for a few hours. I was home, that much I knew, but the loneliness felt as if it might never leave my bones. Would I ever take a breath and not feel hollowed out, the life scraped out of me? It felt like a crime that three thousand miles between us had abated nothing. That I could not breathe knowing Jack was now near— I did not know if I would survive it.

From Sisters of a Halved Heart. Courtesy of Algonquin Books / Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. Copyright (c) 2026 by Nayantara Roy.

Sisters of a Halved Heart, by Nayantara Roy will be released on June 2, 2026 from Algonquin Books. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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