Half Life

On the morning that changes everything, Aruna Ahmed Jones walks out of her ground-floor Victorian apartment in London wearing only jeans and a t-shirt, carrying nothing more substantial than a handbag, and keeps on walking.  Leaving behind the handsome Dr. Patrick Jones, her husband of less than a year, Aruna heads to Heathrow, where she boards a plane bound for Singapore and her old life.  Educated and beautiful, Aruna has a desperate need to risk it all.  But why?  Waiting for her is a messy past and a perfect past lover she had once abandoned without even saying goodbye – a story left unfinished – until now.

Aruna is not running away from home, she is running back to the home she always had, before it became impossible for her to stay.  Before her father, the only family she’d ever known, passed away.  Before she tried, and failed, to create a life and a family with her best friend and lover, Jazz.  Before her doctor delivered a complicated psychological diagnosis she’d rather forget.  After years of fleeing the ghosts that continue to haunt her, Aruna is about to discover that running away is really the easy part; it is coming home—making peace with her past, with Jazz and those they have loved—that is hard.  Spanning the world from London to Singapore to India and back again, Half Life is a richly layered tale of love and conflict, friendship and sacrifice, the luminous story of a young woman who risks everything in order to find where she truly belongs.

Roopa Farooki was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and brought up in London.  She graduated from New College, Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and worked in advertising before writing fiction full time.  Roopa now lives in Southeast England and Southwest France with her husband and two young sons, and teaches creative writing at the Canterbury Christ Chuch University masters' program.