My Novel
The Tide Returns
Genre: Literary Fiction / Political Drama
Status: Manuscript in progress; seeking literary representation
Summary
The Tide Returns is a sweeping, intimate novel about the aftershocks of silence, the cost of truth, and the slow, radical work of becoming.
When Rachel Weiss, a recently divorced mother and daughter of a celebrated Jewish academic, returns to her childhood home on Long Island, she finds herself caught in the undertow of personal grief and political awakening. There, she meets Raihan Ahmed, a young Bangladeshi-American activist and former student of her late mother. Their unlikely connection is electric, destabilizing, and politically fraught, pulling Rachel into a world of protests, state surveillance, and generational reckoning.
As their relationship deepens, it fractures the ecosystems they each come from: liberal Jewish donor circles, South Asian activist movements, and the quiet complicities of the American elite. In the background, the war on Palestine intensifies, migrants are detained in staggering numbers, and those on the margins begin to organize, with or without permission.
But this story is more than about star-crossed lovers.
This is a story about:
- a daughter who must name the truths her mother never spoke,
- a man who must return to the community he once left behind, and
- an activist, Sharmita Sen, whose love, labor, and leadership are too often erased, even by those closest to her.
Tender and unflinching, The Tide Returns interrogates whiteness, power, legacy, and longing. It holds space for grief without romanticizing pain, and lets every character fail, honestly. In a human way.
This is not a book about fixing the world.
It’s about surviving it. Naming it. And choosing not to look away.
Author Note
I’m currently seeking literary representation for The Tide Returns and am in the process of final manuscript development. If you're a literary agent or editor interested in learning more, feel free to contact me directly.
Authorship is not Autobiography
I don’t write autobiography. I write systems through story. Some of the details are from myth and memory. But none of this is about me..not exactly. It’s about what we inherit. What we perform. What we bury. And what finally grows through rebirth.
I’ve lived close enough to the systems I write about, close enough to feel them crush, rupture, erase. That doesn’t make this memoir. It makes it architecture.
Don’t read for confession.
Read for beauty, rebirth and sharp storytelling.
Curious to know more?
Excerpt and media kit available upon request.
About the Author
Kashfia Naz is a Bangladeshi-American writer, strategist, and cultural critic whose work navigates the intersections of power, inheritance, and transformation.
A former advertising executive who led strategy for global brands, she left the corporate world to pursue authorship and critical analysis full-time. Her writing blends literary insight with systems thinking, often mapping the unspoken codes of gender, class, and South Asian femininity.
She is the author of The Rules of Ruin (2024), a poetry collection on grief, exile, and memory, and is currently completing her second collection, Of Milk and Rot: A Record of What We Inherit — a brutal and tender excavation of sisterhood, softness, and performative power.
Kashfia is also the founder of Signal & Strategy, a forthcoming AI literacy and enablement consultancy, and the voice behind A Millennial Learns AI, a real-time notebook from the frontier of technological transformation.
Her work has been described as cinematic, subversive, and deeply human — a signal from the edge of collapse, written in clarity and fire.