Sejal Badani Books in Order

Sejal Badani did not arrive in publishing by the usual neat route. She trained and worked as an attorney before turning back to the thing she had wanted for years, writing fiction. That earlier career still matters, though. Her novels tend to be careful about motive, clear about consequences, and deeply interested in the private stories people hide inside a family.

She knew early.

Badani has said she was around six when she realized she wanted to write, after reading Judy Blume and telling her sister she wanted to make books of her own one day. As a kid, she read constantly and started inventing stories in her head. Long before publication, she was writing screenplays, short stories, monologues, and novels, learning by doing and reading her way forward.

The turning point came after the birth of her first child. During a break from law, she started writing seriously, first working on a screenplay inspired by stories her husband had told her about his college running days. She once joked that she had a foolproof plan to publish a book or sell a movie before her son turned one. Real life, and then a second child, had other ideas.

The road took time.

For years she wrote in the gaps between family life, sent work to contests and magazines, and stacked up rejections alongside small wins. She took classes, kept trying, and slowly built momentum. A screenplay finalist spot in the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship helped, and eventually more than a hundred agents asked to see her novel. That long apprenticeship shows in the steady, workmanlike way she talks about writing: outline first, draft hard, revise hard, keep going.

Her first novel, Trail of Broken Wings, arrived in 2015 and quickly found readers. The book follows three sisters pulled back toward the family history they tried to escape, and it tackles domestic violence, shame, survival, and the cost of silence. Badani has said the story had lived in her head for years, and that research into real accounts of abuse and resilience shaped how she wrote it. Readers who connect with her work often start here, because it shows her at full emotional intensity.

The Storyteller's Secret widened her canvas. The novel grew from family history, especially the early death of her maternal grandmother and the hard childhood her mother lived afterward. Badani has written that working on the book changed how she understood her own mother, and that personal thread gives the novel its pull. It is a story about grief, love, inherited pain, and the way the past keeps speaking, even across generations and continents.

Those same concerns keep showing up in later work. The Days Before Us looks at motherhood, memory, and the kind of unfinished family business that can follow a person into adulthood. The Sun's Shadow turns to betrayal, illness, forgiveness, and the messy ways two families can become linked. Across the books, Badani returns again and again to women at a breaking point, family secrets, cultural inheritance, and the possibility of hope after a lot of hurt.

She writes big feelings, but she also writes toward repair.

That may be why her novels have traveled so widely. Her books have been published in more than fifteen languages, and she has appeared on several bestseller lists. When she is not writing, she has said she loves reading and traveling, and she likes working with music in the background, especially Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and Ed Sheeran. It fits the books somehow: serious subjects, open heart, and a belief that people can still find their way back to one another.