My Books

Beyond My Father’s House (BMFH) is my fourth non-fiction book and is somewhat biographical. A friendship between a young Indian 15-year-old boy and a 23-year-old American circus performer, born in Bombay in 1963, is renewed years later in Oklahoma City in 1995 during the time of the bombing tragedy that cost 168 lives, 13 of them children.

It has got everything imaginable: Ethos, pathos, and apotheosis. Right now, as I write, children are being lowered deep into the earth in South Africa and other places to excavate ores.

What have we children ever done to you!

Simpli Ma’s Story (SMS), my third book, published in January 2026, is mostly biographical, mainly about my uncommon Ma, Rachel, who, with her simple, common-sense, humorous ways, pulled us through some hectic and hard times. Simpli Ma's Story spans several decades. It starts off with an accident when the youngest of the family, Rachel or Rahel, comes on stage, a child chasing butterflies behind her home in Travancore. She falls on a sharp rock and slips into a coma for days. The Vaidya next door restores her, only for poverty to force her out of school at twelve. That relentless, never-give-up twelve-year-old in the mid-1920s became an assistant nurse trainee in Madurai—land of temples—in another state, nearly 200 miles away, at Erskine Hospital on the Vaigai. It transformed her, and how!

I published my first book, My Father's House (MFH), in the U.S. in October 2024 and in India in January 2025. My second book, Steeplechase and Other Stories (SOS), published in October 2025, is also somewhat autobiographical—a well I keep drawing from, even now—a collection of fifteen short stories spanning nearly seven decades.

With a passion for reading and an eye for detail, I bring to the page stories that are thoughtful and thought-provoking, humorous, and, at times, poignant, truthful, and, yes, unbelievable.

I write not to impress, but to connect. If you find yourself laughing, nodding, welling up—just as I did while writing these stories, bit by bit, yarn by yarn, recollection by recollection—or unexpectedly moved, I'd say the writing did its job.

Note: I published my fourth book, Beyond My Father’s House (BMFH), on June 14,  per my deadline. My website, Emdanielbooks.com, is in the publication cycle; anytime now, they say.  

The book covers were made by me, and each back cover has a logo similar to the one below with an acronym for my books, such as MFH (shown), SOS, SMS, or BMFH.