Below is the complete list of Sejal Badani books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of Good Intentions Books
About Sejal Badani
Sejal Badani is an American novelist and former attorney whose fiction centers on family, cultural inheritance, trauma, motherhood, forgiveness, and the long consequences of secrets carried across generations. A USA Today, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon Charts bestselling author, she is best known for Trail of Broken Wings and The Storyteller’s Secret. Her work has been published in more than fifteen languages, and she has also been a finalist for the Goodreads Best Fiction award and the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship.
Badani worked as an attorney before leaving law to pursue writing full-time. That change led to a relatively compact but thematically consistent body of fiction in which domestic relationships often carry the weight of much larger questions. Her characters tend to be women confronting histories that have been concealed, distorted, or endured in silence, and the emotional tension frequently comes from discovering that understanding a family’s past does not automatically make forgiveness simple.
Her debut novel, Trail of Broken Wings, published in 2015, established those concerns immediately. The story follows Indian American photographer Sonya as she returns to her estranged family after her abusive father falls into a coma. Her sisters, Trisha and Marin, and their mother have each survived the family’s history differently, making the reunion less about one hidden revelation than about the damage created when trauma is processed through silence, denial, ambition, and escape. Domestic violence, racism, cultural expectations, shame, and the complicated possibility of healing form the novel’s emotional foundation.
Badani reached an even wider readership with The Storyteller’s Secret in 2018. The novel follows New York journalist Jaya, whose marriage is deteriorating after repeated pregnancy loss. Seeking answers about her family, she travels to India and gradually learns the story of her grandmother through Ravi, a former servant and confidant who remembers a very different version of the past. The book moves between generations and historical periods, connecting Jaya’s contemporary grief with her grandmother’s experiences during British rule in India.
That structure highlights one of Badani’s strongest recurring interests: the way people inherit emotional histories they do not fully understand. Mothers and daughters, sisters, marriages, migration, sacrifice, and cultural identity recur throughout her fiction, often through characters who discover that the people closest to them possessed private lives far more complicated than family memory suggests.
Her shorter work The Days Before Us, published as part of the multi-author Good Intentions collection, concentrates those ideas around motherhood. Its protagonist, Autumn, is pregnant while dealing with an estranged mother, an absent father, a troubled marriage, and painful childhood memories. The story asks whether someone can create a different family future without first confronting the experiences that shaped her understanding of parenthood.
Badani returned to full-length fiction with The Sun’s Shadow in 2025. The novel brings two women, Celine and Felicity, into conflict through a marriage already strained by betrayal and then complicates that rivalry when a child’s serious illness creates a situation in which their families may depend upon one another. Rather than treating infidelity as a simple division between victim and antagonist, Badani uses the premise to examine motherhood, resentment, forgiveness, and second chances.
Across her bibliography, Badani writes relationship-driven fiction in which the central conflicts often begin inside families but extend into questions of culture, memory, identity, and personal responsibility. Her novels are mostly standalones rather than parts of a continuing series, making her work best understood through those recurring emotional concerns rather than through shared characters or chronology.