Fresh out of college and brand new to the city, Rumi stumbles into the perfect arrangement: housesitting a gorgeous townhouse in the West Village. The brownstone, filled with tasteful furniture and luxury skincare products, belongs to her best friend's uncle and comes with a menagerie of exotic pets to care for - and a writer, ten years her senior, who uses the upstairs office as his workspace.
Rumi finds herself quickly falling into an obsessive romance with Saif, who is wise and sophisticated, everything Rumi wants to someday embody. But Saif is not entirely available. Rumi finds that his open relationship with a woman named Jaya is much more complex than it seems, and soon, the power dynamics between the three of them will propel Rumi to places she never expected.
Housesitting her way across New York, Rumi discovers herself among the accoutrements of other people - but she must also examine the intricate questions of her own immigration from India, her family history and the contesting cultures from which she comes.
Reminiscent of luminary novels like All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, Luster by Raven Leilani and Green Dot by Madeleine Gray, Housesitting asks what it means to belong in a house, to belong in a country - to belong, even, to the people we love?