Alka Joshi Books in Order

Alka Joshi was born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, and moved with her family to the United States in 1967, when she was nine. India remained a living presence through family stories, memories, and later visits, while most of her growing up happened in America.

She studied art history at Stanford University, graduating in 1980. After college, she tried a management-training job in Los Angeles, quickly realized it wasn't for her, and looked for a more creative way to make a living.

Advertising turned out to be that path. Joshi took design and advertising classes, began work as a copywriter, and eventually founded her own marketing agency in 1995. The job taught her how to tell a complete little story in a few seconds, whether through a radio spot or a television commercial.

Fiction came later.

In 2009, Joshi put most of her business work on hold and enrolled in the creative-writing MFA program at California College of the Arts. There, she began the long process of writing The Henna Artist. She spent about a decade shaping the novel, drawing in part on questions raised by her mother's early arranged marriage and imagining a different kind of life for a woman in 1950s India.

Published in 2020, The Henna Artist introduced Lakshmi, a young woman who escapes an abusive marriage and builds a hard-won independent life in Jaipur. The book became a New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club selection. Readers often come to it for the vivid setting, but stay with it for Lakshmi's resourcefulness, her complicated family ties, and the daily work behind making a life of her own.

Joshi continued that world in The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, which follows Malik as he takes a job at Jaipur's royal palace and is pulled into the fallout from a disaster at a new cinema. The Perfumist of Paris turns to Lakshmi's younger sister, Radha, now pursuing a career in fragrance while confronting unfinished business from her past. The three novels move through changing decades and locations, but remain connected by family, ambition, class, secrets, and the choices women are allowed to make.

With Six Days in Bombay, Joshi moved to 1937 Bombay and followed a young nurse into a mystery that stretches across India and Europe.

Her novels tend to focus on people whose practical skills matter, artists, healers, caretakers, workers, and young people trying to claim more room in the world. She writes about belonging and family without making those things simple. Joshi lives in Pacific Grove, California, with her husband, and continues to write historical fiction shaped by both research and personal history.