We're pleased to announce that Hot Water by debut novelist Bhavika Govil will be published in the UK in August 2026 by Jacaranda Books. After its success in India, published by Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, French rights were snapped up in a pre-empt by Editions de la Martinière in a two-book deal. All other translation and audiovisual rights are currently available.
The title will be published within Sareeta's List - Stories That Matter, a campaign celebrating the extraordinary editorial vision of Sareeta Domingo, who passed in September 2025, and the four titles she had acquired for the Jacaranda list, which were announced in The Bookseller on May 1st.
* Shortlisted for the 2025 Mumbai LitFest/Godrej Literature Live! Best First Book Prize
* Shortlisted for the 2025 PVLF Author Excellence Awards for Best Debut Fiction
* A 2025 Vogue India recommendation
* A 2025 Platform Magazine "Debut Book To Watch Out For"
* Winner of the Pontas & JJ Bola Emerging Writers Prize 2021
* A David Higham New Writers' Open Week finalist
"Bhavika Govil uses imagination, insight and humour to craft a tender but unsettling family tale. A charming and confident debut that I enjoyed tremendously." Amrita Mahale, author of Milk Teeth
“In this whimsical cocoon, each must find their place. … A lovely polyphonic novel that gradually reveals the crushing weight of social conventions in Indian society.” Magazine Advantages (France)
Hot Water is a coming-of-age story of three characters and the different ways in which they grow up, and, eventually, apart. It is a novel about our first experiences with intimacies and how they make and wreck us. This is a story of love in all its quiet, exhilarating forms—from the poetry of sibling relationships to the beauty and torment of awakening desire. Lastly, it is a story of how a family lives around each other’s secrets, and the ways in which grief—and even love itself—can ultimately suffocate us.
Bhavika’s short fiction has already won or been selected for an impressive number of prizes and was recently published in Granta, and we are convinced that this is just the start of a long literary career.
For more information about the above title, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna[at]pontas-agency.com).