What You Call Winter is Nalini’s debut collection of linked stories was published in 2007 by Knopf in the US and by Harper Collins India in India. 

praise

“Nalini Jones writes about the marginal community of Christians in Bombay and the neighourhoods in which they live. To the outside, these seem to possess a fabled calm, but the insider knows they are in many ways on the brink of dissolution. Jones combines the outsider’s wonder with an insider’s shrewdness, and walks the line between the two with genuine intelligence and skill: she’s a terrific writer.”   – Amit Chaudhuri

“Nalini Jones’s stories twine round each other in a rich exploration of time and place, in a particular town, Santa Clara, in post-colonial India. The family in What You Call Winter is devout in its Catholic heritage, its culture within their country’s culture carried on in English. The reader may have a sense that we’ve not been here before, but perhaps we have for Jones’s beautifully crafted stories recall Chekov’s plays with their moving portrayal of the sorrows and steady belief of those who stay, the trials and accommodations of those who go away. At times, the visits back to India are heartbreaking in their revelations; at other times amusing in their presumption of the better life abroad. Much like Eudora Welty’s extraordinary collection of stories, The Golden Apples, time unfolds in these stories from the Edenic garden of childhood to the broken lives and the salvaged hopes of those who endure.”  – Maureen Howard

“These stories come into the ear and eye with the bright clarity of the best fairy-tales; they’re also addictive and real and true. I love this book. I love its stories one by one, and I love the way they are linked to make a natural whole.” – John Casey

“With elegance and care, Nalini Jones has brilliantly conjured up the lost world of Catholic India. Her well-wrought tales ring true and her themes of love, loss, and family are universal. In this book, she combines a deep cultural and emotional intelligence – a truly fine balance.” – Fareed Zakaria

“How does she do it? A child, a family, a household, a community, a faith, and era – and suddenly What You Call Winter is so much more than the sum of its arts. Delightful and deeply moving, here are nine elegantly interconnected tales which introduce a world new in American fiction. The eye is keen, the voice is intimate, and Nalini Jones has made an important debut.”  – Dave King

“Here’s a collection of stories that deepens as it goes along. It offers a world—Catholic India—pleasingly unfamiliar to most American readers, and perhaps to many Indian readers as well. Readers of any stripe will find, however, the familiar virtues for which we keep returning to short stories: empathy, breadth, the joys in paced concealment and revelation.  And there is as well a sharp ear for a fine phrase (“bravado nearly as sustaining as courage,” “face scrubbed clear of any expression but acquiescence”), which brings some of the music of poetry to the patient observations of the fiction writer.”  – Brad Leithauser