A regional manager with Bell Mobility and a mother of two, north Delta’s Gurjinder Basran squeezed a creative writing program at Simon Fraser University into her life. There she wrote a novel about a young Indo-Canadian woman trying to assert her independence in a strict Punjabi Sikh community. She’s calling it Everything Was Goodbye.

Apart from Ranj Dhaliwal’s Daaku, not many novels have been written about the Indo-Canadian experience. Few books speak to “the first generation that grew up here,” says 35-year-old Basran, who is seeking an agent and a publisher. “I’m hoping it will resonate with all kinds of people.”

Not only that, but the novel is a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, one of 100 entries out of 5,000 chosen by Penguin editors for the final read-through to narrow the field to ten books, which will then be chosen by Amazon readers… and presumably will be published by Penguin, although there’s no information about that on the Amazon site that I could find. Check out the excerpt of Everything Was Good-bye for as a free download from Amazon.