Story Snapshot
Born in a Chennai slum, Trips fights her way forward through intelligence and sheer determination, believing in love and faith—even as experience teaches her how vulnerable both can be. As ambition carries her from flooded streets and IIT classrooms to Silicon Valley boardrooms, the people bound to her are fighting quieter battles of their own.
Naresh struggles to rebuild dignity after physical trauma. Utkarsh, once protected by privilege, seeks redemption among children society overlooks. And Vanita—steady, wounded, uncelebrated—becomes the thread holding fractured lives together.
Spanning nearly four decades and crossing continents—from the Krishna River to California, from Harvard to Times Square—When We Fell Upward follows what success gives, what it costs, and what it can never replace.
Told with large-hearted, cinematic momentum grounded in lived realism, the novel weaves romance, disability, colorism, memory, and moral reckoning into a story of fierce second chances—where love isn’t earned through perfection, but claimed through vulnerability.
A story about who carries us upward—and the debts we owe when we finally rise.
