‘Heartbreak, loss threw me into politics’: Sonia Gandhi’s memoir out in November

“Much has been written about my family, but few narratives were able to reach into the truth of their motivations, their actions and even their very human failings,” the statement attributed to Gandhi read. She describes the volume as “a homage to their humanness,” adding that her own story offers “a unique perspective of the social and political changes I have witnessed for six decades in the beautiful country of my belonging.”

Born in a small Italian town, Gandhi was studying in Cambridge when she met the grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru and son of Indira Gandhi. Life, she writes, was upended in 1984 when her mother-in-law fell to assassins’ bullets, propelling Rajiv Gandhi into the prime ministership, only for him to be murdered seven years later. In 2004, she turned down her party’s offer to lead the government, a decision the publisher says she revisits with unflinching candour in the book.

The cover features a greyscale photograph of a younger Sonia Gandhi. (Photo: Instagram/aaknoph)

“Writing about my life did not come easily to me,” she acknowledged in her statement, per the AP. “It meant opening myself up, sharing moments and experiences I had always held deep inside. Yet as I gradually removed myself from the political sphere and looked back at all I had seen, the thread of love and loyalty that wove through my story began to define itself, from the simplicity of my childhood in small-town Italy, to the complexity of my years in India as the wife of Rajiv Gandhi and the daughter-in-law of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.”

Knopf, reputed for its prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction, is positioning the memoir as a major autumn title, one that promises a deeply human portrait of a woman shaped by forces far larger than herself.