The Object of Your Affections

In this ambitious adult contemporary, Kothari (My Last Love Story) delivers a rich story of a married couple wrangling with the multiplicity of modern-day reproductive options. Paris Kahn is a Manhattan assistant district attorney, South Asian by birth and Jewish by adoption; her husband, Neal Singh Fraser, is a world-famous jewelry designer in line for a Scottish lordship. Neal desperately wants children. Paris doesn’t want to go through pregnancy and childbirth—but decides that surrogacy would be acceptable. She asks her college friend, Naira, to be their surrogate, but Naira is still reeling from recent widowhood and a mass of family complications that came with it. Unsurprisingly, the pregnancy process digs up everyone’s deepest feelings about family, children, and partnership. The plot is fairly predictable as a result, since there are only so many things fundamentally decent people can do in such a situation, but the characters are well-defined, and the ways that surrogacy does and doesn’t fit with Naira’s conservative Indian family are nuanced and considered. Paris’s own adoption angst is handled a little overbearingly, but overall, the emotional and ethical dilemmas feel authentic as well as entertaining. Readers who have been on their own infertility or surrogacy journeys will feel many pangs of commonality with these all-too-human characters. Agent: Andrea Somberg, Harvey Klinger Inc. (Feb.)