Death by Culture Shock

When grief blurs reality and pandemic warps the world, can love survive the ultimate culture shock? When Kajal loses her father to an unexpected complication after surgery, her world fractures just as she's accepted into a prestigious graduate program, fulfilling the dream her father will never witness. As grief twists her days and her father's ghost haunts her nights, Kajal finds herself drifting from Dale, her boyfriend of eleven years. Between caring for her mother in Harlem, the weight of her Pakistani-American heritage, and the magnetic pull of new relationships at school, the foundations of her identity begin to shift beneath her feet. Then a global pandemic descends on New York City, transforming the landscape of their lives just as surely as Kajal's personal crisis has transformed her. With people literally taking flight above the city streets and the boundaries between reality and imagination blurring, Kajal and Dale must decide whether to evolve together or apart. In this haunting debut that weaves magical realism with raw emotional truth, Death by Culture Shock explores how we rebuild ourselves in the aftermath of loss-and whether the connections that defined our past can survive the shock of an unrecognizable future.