Vibhuti Jain Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Vibhuti Jain is a published author who goes by the nickname ‘Vib’. She is married and has a daughter. She lives with her husband and daughter in Johannesburg, South Africa. There she has a job in international development.

Vibhuti started out working as a corporate lawyer based in New York City. She attended and graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School. Though she now lives in South Africa, she grew up in Connecticut in Guilford.

Her first novel to come out is titled Our Best Intentions and it was published in 2023. She says that she was inspired to write the story simply because she had always retained a desire to write and felt that the story was ‘brewing’ inside her. Jain says that the plot of her novel was actually inspired by incidents that happened in real life in a real high school in the suburbs of New York City. The author had learned about the series of true incidents while on an Uber Ride. Her imagination and curiosity were too much and she took on the story, resulting in her first novel.

Jain says that she penned the first draft of her novel during the second part of 2019. She then took a great deal of time in 2020 working on the story, making it more polished and doing revisions. Since she had a full-time job at the time that was paying the bills, Jain mainly spent nights and weekends working on the manuscript.

The author then found her agent contacting her through email and worked with Alexa further on polishing the story. The work paid off and the novel was sold in 2022 to a woman named Liz Stein working at William Morrow. Jain says that she is thrilled with Morrow’s team since they share the vision of the book and have proved themselves to be great advocates of it. The author shares that the book’s plot has largely stayed the same, but the text itself and the pacing and ending went through a number of changes on the way from starting product to finished result.

Jain says that as her first novel and publishing process experience have occurred, she’s had many surprises and learning moments. She was also surprised to find out that publication would be a year out since she wasn’t familiar with all of the behind-the-scenes work that goes on before final publication. Now, of course, she has witnessed firsthand what it takes to make a manuscript ready to be publishing, from copy editing to publicity outreach, and it makes her feel lucky she’s had such a good team to collaborate with.

Before writing a book, Jain thought that the toughest part would be putting down the first draft. She then found out that revising the manuscript and working it over was actually tougher for her. With her first novel, the text changed from original draft to final result quite a bit, and found that she got to understand characters better and more backstory or different details would come up as she wrote.

Jain hopes that readers of her book will enjoy reading it for a start. She also hopes that her story will spark thinking about the different social issues in the book and that it even sparks some conversation about them. She says that she chose to write the book through different perspectives, even through characters that may seem to be unsavory because the characters might be relatable when stripped down to their intent, and that can be powerful. She acknowledges that the book takes on some deeper social issues, but is also telling the tale of a family that is trying to figure out how they can be there for each other, even while messing up along the way.

Her advice for other writers is to write the book that you actually want to write and do not let yourself worry about the next step of the process, thinking about the process of selling it and publishing the book. Jain says to get the manuscript that you are proud of done first, and then take on the next steps of the process.

Our Best Intentions is the debut novel from Vibhuti Jain and it was published 2023. This is the intriguing tale of an immigrant family that faces trouble when getting caught up in a criminal investigation.

Main character Babur Singh lives in New York in a nice suburb with his daughter, Angie. Known by the nickname Bobby, Babur is not only a single parent but a business owner, owning “Move with Bobby”, his startup Uber business.

Babur always has his eye trained on going up the ladder when it comes to doing well in America and living the financially successful version of the American dream. His daughter Angie is fairly introverted, and doesn’t usually feel comfortable in her own body as a teen except for when swimming.

Angie is on her way home walking during summer break one day, coming from swimming at the pool at the highschool. Suddenly she discovers a classmate bleeding on the local football field. It’s Henry McCleary, a student from a prominent and wealthy family in the area. He’s been stabbed, and she’s the first to find him.

The police begin looking into the incident and decide to hone in on Chiara Thompkins. The girl in question is black and has run away from home. She also has gone missing after the stabbing incident. Later it’s found out that she hadn’t been enrolled in the high school properly.

The community is shaken up by the incident, which shows how far families will go when it comes to trying to protect themselves. The town is shaken up by it. Meanwhile, Angie has to wade through the different points of view and struggle with her own moral culpability in the situation. Her father is also doing what he can to protect her as well as what he has done so far to fit in, which ends up bleeding into his view of right and wrong.

Taking time to tell this story from different points of views, Vibhuti Jain’s dramatic debut is the story of a man and his daughter taking a closer look at the bonds that tie them together and to their community. Once you pick up this story, you won’t be able to stop turning the pages until it is done. Pick up a copy and see for yourself!