The Road Between Us

The Road Between Us

Bindu Suresh

$23.95

Longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize

A lover’s knot of a novel that spans continents and decades, The Road Between Us delves into the entangled lives of its ensemble cast.

Estela, a lawyer, struggles professionally after a deep childhood loss and an ill-advised undergraduate dalliance. Ash is a diplomat posted to Buenos Aires and Beijing who wants what he can’t have. Ophélie, a nurse, makes a grievous medical error that alters the course of her life. And Roman is an academic whose careless sexual escapades after a painful divorce lead to even more painful consequences.

Tense, poetic, and as binge-worthy as a miniseries, The Road Between Us explores why we make the decisions we do, and how those decisions affect the people we love.

“An ideal summer literary read that clips along in episodic bursts as its smart, flawed characters navigate love, sex and regret within a feminist narrative sensibility… beautifully written, a poetic, episodic page-turner.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“Compulsively readable… There are loads of tough and subtle lesson in Suresh’s book, but most of all, The Road Between Us is a complicated tangle of people and the ways that they cross paths through time, some more damaging than others.”—The Miramichi Reader

“Shifting perspectives throw a group of interconnected people in and out of one another’s orbits as they resist and capitulate to their impulses: romantic, self-destructive, and otherwise.”—Literary Review of Canada

“The complex ties between a far-flung group of high-achieving friends over the course of the 21st century is the canvas of this engrossing group portrait.”—Zoomer

“Bindu Suresh is a master of craft. She reels you in from the first page and then keeps you entranced with poetic yet stark prose that delicately and unapologetically reveals the inner truths of her characters. A beautiful and soulful read.”—Zalika Reid-Benta, author of River Mumma and Frying Plantain

Author

Bindu Suresh

Publication date

May 13, 2025

Print details

9781998336173 / Paperback / 5.5 x 8.5 / 248 pages

Ebook details

9781998336180 / DRM-free epub / Conforms to WCAG 2.0 Level AA

Rights

North America

Colophon

Printed in Canada by Imprimerie Gauvin (Gatineau, Quebec) using Sustana EnviroBook™ 100% recycled uncoated paper and cover stock milled near Montreal, Quebec.

Using one ton of Sustana EnviroBook™ rather than a virgin paper saves the equivalent of 24 trees, 1,773 gallons of water, and 3,399 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions.

from The Road Between Us by Bindu Suresh

Estela

Estela’s mouth was dry as she dialed the familiar number. She remembered his tentative big toe caressing her calf as they lay next to each other, her jerk away from him, the uncomfortable night spent huddled at the edge of his double bed. The next morning—almost fourteen years ago now—she’d finished her stovetop coffee and left his New York apartment, stealing away while he was still in the shower.

“Ash?” she said, when he answered.

He paused. “Estela?” he asked, slowly.

“A blast from the past, right?”

Estela had heard only bits and pieces about Ash’s life in the years since they’d last spoken. From a colleague at her law firm whose husband also worked in the foreign service, she learned Ash had gotten promoted and moved to Beijing. A friend of a friend had tagged him in a social media post in Brazil: cocktail in hand, dark sunglasses concealing his eyes, bearded. And, in an email exchange Estela had initiated just a few months ago—with superficial details about where she lived now and the new guy she was seeing—Ash shared how he’d gotten home from a boys’ weekend in Tremblant, one-carat engagement ring in his pocket, to a cold, darkened house, his girlfriend’s goodbye note on their front-entrance table. I thought all weekend about how I wanted a life with her just as she was thinking she wanted to leave, he’d written.

On the other end of the line, Ash was silent.

Estela continued. “This is going to be superawkward, but I need your help.”

(…)