Eshani Surya’s gripping debut novel, Ravishing, imagines a near-future world where cosmetic products can literally transform the user’s face; the result is a narrative that offers pointed critique of the beauty industry amidst a story of complex friendship and family dynamics. In the novel, ReNulook, a product created by cosmetic corporation Evolvoir, uses nanotechnology to temporarily rearrange consumers’ faces based on designs the users create—like a physical version of Facetune. Though the technology is revolutionary, Evolvoir downplays the harmful physical effects ReNulook can have on its users. In dual points of view, the novel follows insecure teenager Kashmira grappling with her father’s recent abandonment, and Kashmira’s estranged brother Nikhil, a new employee at Evolvoir.
Ravishing takes an unflinching look at the cosmetics industry and the ways corporations push past safeguards to maximize sales. Surya further complicates Evolvoir’s insidiousness through Nikhil, whose acceptance of the Evolvoir narrative means he unwittingly feeds the predatory beauty industry practices that especially target Black and brown girls—a reflection of the harm perpetuated by beauty standards today, where whiteness is often centered and treated as the ideal.
Surya expertly balances Kashmira and Nikhil’s points of view in the novel. Each narrative strand shows the siblings struggling to find their place in the world and make sense of their father’s recent abandonment. Though the siblings are estranged for much of the novel, they haunt each other’s stories, each one thinking of (and often misunderstanding) the other. Their pain and love for each other feel true, complex, and deeply affecting. At the same time, the narrative pace of each storyline gives Ravishing a dazzling momentum, especially as events come to a head at the book’s climax.
Surya, too, is unafraid to grapple with her subject matter, including the side effects Kashmira experiences from ReNuLook. Ultimately, Kashmira must learn to live with sickness and disability, which Surya neither romanticizes as an inspiration narrative nor flattens into a story of tragedy.
Ravishing weaves together the story of familial abuse and generational trauma with a broader look at social complexities, like the question of whether empowerment can come from a product.
—Diana Towner
An Excerpt from Ravishing
Her mouth drops into a hesitant o when she first looks at herself in the mirror.
The girl on the screen films whenever she can. Her phone’s camera, a hungry eye, beckons. But she doesn’t mind being wanted. The more people keep watching her, keep calling her the best of the best, the more her mind loops with clever visuals instead of memories she’d prefer not to fall asleep to. So she records. So she posts—online. So, she presses her phone to her chest and waits for the comments to come in, all of them for her.
Today, the girl on the screen uses her thumbnail to slice open a box. Inside, a tube. Inside that, a product she layers over her face. Now she starts filming, and as the cream is absorbed there is a twist and a tug, like something caught needs release. It hurts, but in a good way, like floss parting the gums around a tooth, startling the mouth with blood. The girl’s features rearrange and for a split second her whole face looks mangled. She doesn’t flinch. In editing, she speeds up the process so no one notices when things go gruesome.
The girl’s face sculpted, elongated, augmented exactly as she wanted it. She smiles, both at that and at how her view count ticks up as soon as she posts. Her followers send her blue hearts, green hearts, whatever color heart their fingers hit first. Some crimson ones, too. Blood, the girl thinks again, then makes herself forget.
Later, the girl on the screen deletes her video and reposts a better version of it. She edits out one clip—her mouth, in that hesitant little o.
*
The whole party moves like a single animal, lumbering back and forth between the foul juice-and-liquor concoction haphazardly set up on the weather-cracked patio furniture and the in-ground pool where four boys play a game of chicken. One of them shouts a long “fu-u-u-ck” as he goes tumbling into the water, but Kashmira doesn’t look up. She stands between a seated boy’s legs and angles her mouth against his. Though Tej bites her lip too hard, she doesn’t stop kissing him. Tonight is about nothing but becoming someone new in the wake of her father’s call a month ago. The call during which Vinod announced not that he was coming home after a year and a half of forgotten holidays and missed school ceremonies, but rather that divorce papers would soon arrive in the mail.
“You’re better at this than I thought you would be,” Tej slurs.
Kashmira says nothing. She never shows up to these parties, though the guest lists are made up of South Asian kids from her so-called family-friendly suburb, Marlton, and the rest of South Jersey, too. Today’s party, on the second Saturday in June, is just a fifteen-minute drive from her house, but sometimes the hosts live much farther away. Because there aren’t as many brown teens here as in Edison or Jersey City, people travel for these things. But regardless of distance it always works like this: One of the richer kids’ parents go out of town, usually to some big wedding, and everyone starts texting about what alcohol to bring and what lies to tell the “aunties and uncles.” While Kashmira sometimes ends up on the text chains, no one really ever expects her to come. People have been calling her a loner since her father left, and even in the years before that, she rarely hung out with the other brown kids anyway. Tonight, though, she intends to change all this, to become someone new amid the blaring Bollywood music that some self-appointed DJ cuts with rap.
So far, none of the thirty or so attendees have acted surprised at Kashmira’s presence, possibly because they’re already too far gone on punch and hormones to care. The only one who notices her is the boy she is draped over now: Tej, a stranger, who she can only guess is interested because he is tired of sleeping with his usual girls. After an hour at the party even Kashmira has heard the gossip that he has been looking for someone new, someone fresh. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he circled her little wrist with his meaty hand and pulled her close and that she can pretend she is like the other girls here: flitting around the party in their light, lithe bodies.
“Have I even seen you around before?” Tej says. He blinks up at her, waiting.
“You would remember meeting me,” she tells him. It sounds awkward, but Tej laughs. She feels the rumble of it under the hands she settled on his chest.
“You need more punch,” he says. “Come on, it’s inside.”
Holding on to one of her belt loops, Tej leads her around the perimeter of the yard, where the grass is due for a mow. His thumb creeps under her waistband while he pulls her along. It feels for her hip bone, and she lets it. Inside, they pass the kitchen, where juice litters the island. Neither of them stops to ask about if they should be refrigerated. Instead Tej opens the door to a bedroom, and there, he sits Kashmira on the bed and sprawls next to her. The mattress is firm beneath her spine as she lays back. Tej’s stubble comes in at the underside of his jaw. She touches it. Then, they kiss.
It’s Kashmira’s first kiss, all messy tongue and alcohol stink, but she decides to enjoy it. She lets Tej pull her on top of him, and doesn’t stiffen when he grabs her ass so eagerly it puts her off balance. When she collapses, it just gets them closer, and he nuzzles her cleavage. Then he goes back to her shorts and undoes the sole button with an easy tweak of his fingers.
“You should, you know,” Tej says, unzipping his pants and gesturing.
She knows what he means, even though she hasn’t done it before. When Tej stands, Kashmira slides off the bed and onto the carpet. Instead of looking at Tej’s erection, she glances in the mirror, hoping she’ll see a clear-eyed girl, in control, pressing her hand against the muscular thigh of one of the most coveted boys at this party.
But no.
In the mirror, she sees the specter of her father, Vinod, animated in her face. Reflected at her, in her, are his heavy-lidded eyes, his crooked nose, his squarish jawline. That face that contorted in fury whenever she did the smallest thing wrong. That face that went scarily blank after he yelled himself hoarse. That face that never loved her enough and doesn’t love her now. Pain runs through her abdomen, and she gasps, but her breath won’t come in or out, and this leaves her panicked, digging her nails into Tej’s thigh without meaning to.
“Shit, let go,” he says.
“I—I—”
“Hey,” Tej says, nudging her shoulder.
Kashmira just shakes her head. Yes, people have always told her she looks like her father. Vinod used to say it himself. But now, for the first time, she sees how impossible it is—how impossible it will always be—to escape the man who so easily fractured the girl he demanded she be.
She can’t look any longer.
Excerpted from Ravishing by Eshani Surya. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
An Interview with Eshani Surya
Diana Towner (DT): Thank you for talking with me today! I’m excited to talk about Ravishing with you; there was a lot I enjoyed as I read. The ideas around the beauty industry feel especially relevant in the modern day, and I appreciate how you balance the speculative element—a face-morphing nanotechnology—with a grounded coming-of-age arc. Central to Ravishing is this face-morphing nanotechnology, which is used as an ingredient in the fictional NuLook and ReNuLook cosmetic products. Through dual perspectives, you show us the effect that NuLook has on its users, as well as the justifications the corporation Evolvoir uses to market its products. Will you talk about your research process for developing the corporate world of Evolvoir?
Eshani Surya (ES): The interplay between the inside and outside is integral to my interests, and ultimately how the novel was constructed. This interplay is present in the discussion of invisible chronic illness, as well as in the depictions of grief and trauma—as in, the book explores what it means for these characters to live within and without community/connection, as well as what it means for them to have their struggles be outwardly recognized vs. quietly felt. A similar interplay also shaped the way I wanted to develop the corporate world, as I created a brother-sister duo who both have their own distinct versions of closeness and distance with the business. In doing so, I endeavored to provide readers with multiple lenses to look at the company through, thus making Evolvoir more of a dynamic point of tension rather than a static villain.
Kashmira, the younger sister in the duo, knows little of the company’s inner workings, so in that way she is outside of that aspect of the narrative. At the same time, she uses NuLook and ReNuLook and becomes intimately aware of the products’ effects, bringing her very close to the company and its dealings. Her story is one that most of us experience: products are being marketed to us, we use them, and we experience joy and/or suffer the consequences of that, even if we will never be in the same rooms as the billionaires who own said products. At times, this is tolerable. At times, it is tragic. Writing Kashmira’s story required that I look at my own life and the lives of those around me, and consider how corporations and industry control us, with and without our permissions.
Nikhil, the older sibling in the duo, works at the company. His idealism around the business comes, partially, from my own brief stint working in tech spaces. In that industry, workers are brought into the fantasy of how much their products and services can change society for the better. I saw this theme myself, as well as during my research on figures like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos and Emily Weiss of Glossier. By co-creating this fantasy, Nikhil is an insider in the book—to Evolvoir. However, he is also an outsider because he doesn’t use the product, and thus can’t readily accept the truth about the products’ pitfalls. I used Nikhil, and his interactions with his bosses and co-workers, to unveil more about the company’s ethos, hypocrisy, and manipulations.
(DT): You play with genre a bit here by interspersing news reports, scripts for Evolvoir ads, and descriptions of TikTok-like social media posts between chapters. What was it like to work within these different modes of storytelling?
(ES): At its core the book is about eschewing genre. Kashmira’s sections have been defined as a bildungsroman narrative, while Nikhil’s are seen as a business drama. Overall, the book has been called speculative, but also a literary thriller or even body horror. Some publisher gatekeepers balked at this mix of genres, but I wrote the book in these intersecting spaces intentionally. Life doesn’t slot into a neat genre—why should novels? Believing this created natural space in Ravishing to explore these short, interspersed sections. Their inclusion allowed me to build out the slant, speculative world of the book as well. It helped me detail to the reader what this society is like and how it is responding to Evolvoir and its products. Immersion is key to fiction, and this was my opportunity to create that sense for the reader.
On a craft level I enjoyed interspersing these different modes of storytelling. Learning to write them required that I reach out to my friends in the screenwriting and journalism industries. It pushed my technical understanding of voice and audience, and allowed me to gain new skills as a writer.
(DT): Throughout Ravishing, you explore generational trauma, community, and family, as each character navigates the pressures of fitting in, the weight of expectation, and a search for cultural and individual identity. How did you balance these threads?
(ES): I think of Ravishing as a prism. The light that goes into the novel is its main question: what does it mean to live a beautiful, healthy life—and can such a life look ugly too? This question is then distilled into a variety of rainbows, to continue the metaphor. Each rainbow—from that of working in the beauty/wellness industry, navigating chronic illness diagnosis, seeking friendship/community, self-actualizing, sifting through family dynamics—leads back to that initial light.
When I first drafted the novel, I wasn’t sure exactly what its main question was. But after writing it out in full, the question became clear to me. In revision, I was able to tweak any section that didn’t feel directly connected to the book’s main question, thus keeping the novel cohesive. I suppose the question became an outline, in a way. I have never been one to plan out my work ahead of time—both because I lose interest and because it stifles the surprise that is so valuable to making—but I do find that allowing a project to state what it wants to be interested in and then focusing on that direction gives the final draft shape.
(DT): In real life, the ability to change one’s features drastically is becoming more and more commonplace—whether that’s through cosmetic procedures, filters, or AI-generated images. How do you think the fictional technology-based beauty products in Ravishing respond to, or are a product of, our world?
(ES): I began writing Ravishing in earnest in 2020, during the COVID pandemic when many of us were isolated in our homes. Our relationship to our faces changed a lot during that time, especially since we weren’t going out in society and being witnessed by others. We were, however, seeing our faces altered by digital spaces, like Instagram. While I was drafting, I did an experiment where I only used Instagram filters on my face when I was taking selfies. I was shocked by how quickly my brain accepted that version of myself and rejected the version I saw in the mirror in my house. This led me to the idea of a beauty product that could, basically, create a real-life filter on your face. In this way, NuLook and ReNuLook are direct products of the world we live in. Perhaps even more so now, in 2026, when so many of us have access to fillers, other cosmetic procedures, and AI.
However, the products in Ravishing aren’t just notable because of their physical powers. They affect users’ mental health and wellbeing, because Evolvoir clients can erase histories and trauma from their bodies by choosing to alter features that are reminiscent of those things. This, too, is true of the products in our world. Every time we make changes through make-up, procedures, and technology, we draw upon our belief systems: Why do we hate our nose, and change it, for example? Is it ingrained Eurocentric beauty ideals at play? Why do we hate hearing that we look one parent more than the other, and alter our features to look more palatable? Is it because of dysfunctional family dynamics? Most of us don’t so explicitly think through our beauty choices, but the characters in Ravishing do. They unearth a process that we should all be more aware of.
(DT): One thing Ravishing does especially well is level incisive criticism of the cosmetics industry and the state of wellness culture under capitalism—for example, in the ways Evolvoir markets its products as empowering while actively ignoring their potential dangers. I’m interested in hearing more about the ideas of power, intent, and outcome that you were thinking about as you wrote. What role does good intention play in, for example, enabling or covering for exploitation?
(ES): The book is not meant to impart a moral code to readers, but rather to investigate what beliefs we hold close because they give us comfort. Both Evolvoir and Kashmira/Nikhil’s father make choices that many of us wouldn’t make—choices that many would label as inherently bad. Perhaps they are, but it isn’t my job as a novelist to judge them as that. My job is to create deeper understanding of the ways in which humans move through the world.
All in all, I would suggest that all the characters in this novel do have good intentions—or believe in their own good intentions—but many of them make mistakes that harm themselves and others. Isn’t that true of most people? Perhaps the question isn’t about good intentions, but about what responsibility we have when we have more power to make better decisions than others. Which, surely, seems sensible, unless you ask: Why do some have so much power, when others do not? Would it not be better to accept human fallibility, understand that humans will misuse power, and stop allowing for systems where that misuse will happen?
(DT): Throughout the narrative, you explore the impacts of xenophobia, racism, and the loss of identity that stems from living in white spaces. I notice there’s a gendered difference here, too—Kashmira and Roshni both turn to Evolvoir’s products in an attempt to soothe their emotional wounds, while the boys and men in the narrative react in other ways (Nikhil in his struggles with anger, Sachin in positioning himself as an observer, Vinod in distancing himself and his family from his Indian heritage). How did identity factor into your thinking of each character’s arc and role in the plot?
(ES): I originally conceived as Kashmira and Roshni as mirrors of each other, and eventually as mirrors of the influencer, Yukiko. This speaks to the bonds that women and girls often share, in which they protect each other and try to help each other, while also harming each other by engaging in the patriarchy, Eurocentric beauty standards, and internalized misogyny all of which very much come with white spaces. Nikhil, Sachin, and Vinod are also mirrors of each other. Their reactions are all about distance and individuality in some way, which of course, speaks to how men and boys are taught to deploy masculinity as a way to disengage from vulnerability, perpetrate harm, and sever community ties under Western ideals.
Because the novel is so interested in definitions of beauty and ugliness, mirrors made sense as a tool both in the scenes and in the construction of the book. I thought about who resembled each other and why—and also how those resemblances could shift over time and what impact that might have on how these characters navigate the difficult spaces they are inherently part of. In reflecting characters against each other, the novel also investigates how these characters cannot and do not stand alone; they are inextricable from each others’ roles in the world and in their own lives.
Eshani Surya is a disabled, brown writer interested in how we love while navigating the complications, trauma, and radical self-acceptance inherent to marginalization. Her novel, RAVISHING, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and is a Debutiful Best Debut of 2025.
Eshani is a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, a Asian Women Writer’s Workshop mentee, a Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop scholarship recipient, a Mae Fellowship recipient and a Semi-Finalist for Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Award for Novel In-Progress. Her fiction and essays can be read in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Catapult, Joyland, the anthology, Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere.
She is a board member at Blue Stoop, a literary non-profit in Philadelphia, the city where she now lives. She also holds an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she also taught undergraduates. Previously she was a Flash Editor at Split Lip Magazine.
Diana Towner is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she is the Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor and Associate Managing Editor of Ninth Letter. She has previously interned at the University of Illinois Press and Yale University Press in marketing and editorial. Her work has been published in Oyez Review and elsewhere.
