She has forty views, four months, and a grandmother who keeps asking her to read from a falling-apart book.

Seventeen-year-old Zaria D’Mello wants one thing: to matter. Preferably to eleven thousand people at once.

But her design scholarship is slipping away. Her mother is working in Dubai, and her father is somewhere at sea. A resort company wants the land her family has held for generations in the East Indian gaothan of Gorai. And Granny Teresa’s heart is giving out.

So every night, Zaria reads aloud from Story of a Soul, the life of Thérèse Martin. Thérèse was a girl from Normandy who lost her mother at four, cried too easily and worried too much. At fourteen she begged the Pope to let her enter Carmel, and she died at twenty-four believing that being small was not a problem to be fixed but a way to be loved.

Between a creek-side village in Mumbai and a convent in nineteenth-century France, two girls who wanted to be seen discover that they were never, for one moment, unseen.

Funny, tender and true to the words of the saint herself, Shower of Roses is a novel about grief, social media, land, family, and the small, hidden things that turn out to hold the whole world up.

God loves me as I am — and loves me too much to leave me as I am.

For readers aged 15 and up, and for anyone who has ever felt small.