“It’s really strange to my children when they say ‘where are you from’ and they say Washington DC, someone will say, ‘No, no, where are you really from?’ And you know, they look at them that’s a really strange question.”

— Chandrani Ghosh, on belonging

From the Newsroom to the Novel

Before Chandrani became a novelist, she was the journalist in the room. As South Asia bureau chief and White House correspondent for Time, she flew on Marine One and travelled with the presidential motorcade through a cleared Manhattan an experience she describes as “heady.” At Forbes, she worked on the legendary Rich List, lunching with Richard Branson and fielding calls from Donald Trump’s office.

But what she took away from those encounters was not glamour it was insight. “I came to understand what it is about power that is so attractive,” she reflects. “Think of it: you fly into New York on Air Force One, you land, the streets of Manhattan are shut for you. You whiz down to Radio City Hall. You could see why someone in that position would do anything to keep it the power of that power to attract is enormous.” That understanding of power’s seductive force lives in the bones of her fictional senator Lionel, who “gets” power in a way that her tech-world character simply does not.

Her move from journalism to fiction, she insists, was not a rejection of one calling for another. It was a deepening. “In journalism, I’d meet someone with a fascinating story and I could only give it one mention,” she says. “I loved the people part getting to know them. And writing a people-centric story was not that much of a leap.” Her family background helped: two well-known writer cousins and an uncle with several published books meant that the world of literary creation was never alien to her.

“None of my characters are perfect. They’re all flawed and you can still fall in love with them. Their flaws make them human. All of them are likable even when they’re doing the wrong things.”

— Chandrani Ghosh

The Journalist’s Gift to Fiction

Readers of Heartlines have noted something immediately: the book moves. It doesn’t sag. It doesn’t overstay its welcome in any scene. Chandrani credits years of American-style journalism training precision, economy, no wasted words for that quality. “I was really taught to be precise,” she says. “Not to pad too heavily, not to have lots of superfluous words. Be direct, be to the point.” That discipline, she believes, gives the novel its clean, effortless pace.

But journalism gave her more than style. It gave her the instinct to look at the person behind the story always. The habit of asking not just what happened, but why this person, with this history, made this choice in this moment. That instinct, applied to fictional characters, produces the kind of moral complexity that keeps readers turning pages even when no one is behaving well.

The Freedom of Imagination

After more than a decade of telling other people’s stories, Chandrani describes writing fiction as something close to reclaiming a part of herself she had forgotten. “As children, we’re allowed to have deep imaginary worlds,” she says. “We play house, we play teacher, we play doctor. And then as adults, we stop. But being a writer gives you back that licence your imagination gets to run free. And that is deeply, deeply fulfilling.”

She is already looking forward. Heartlines is a beginning, not an arrival. And for a woman who has ridden in Marine One, interviewed the world’s richest people, and raised a family between cultures that enthusiasm for what comes next feels entirely, characteristically, her own.