This isn’t a love story. It is just what happens when logic fails.
Author: Paula Onohi Omokhomion
Publisher: Independent
Pages: 776
Genre: Literary Fiction/Family Drama/Contemporary Romance
Format: Kindle
In a world where novels defy conventions and heroes defy expectations, Shape of the Sun dares to ask: What if the one at the center isn't kind? What if no one is misunderstood? What does it mean to be the hero or the villain?
Beware: this is not a love story. The author just likes meta-fiction a bit too much.
Rajkumar 'Raj' Reddy is top-tier Male Lead material. And a freaking DRAMA KING.
He is a gorgeous, disgustingly rich, and ultra-confident Child Abuse Pediatrician. He's also emotionally finished, a narcissist, and a scammer all but in name.
But what did it matter if he was soulless or morally bankrupt? Why should anyone care that he married someone only because of their money?
He was the Male Lead, right? Since when were Male Leads ever held accountable?
And then he falls in love. Utterly useless. Very, very unnecessary. Annoyingly delicious for someone as self-aware as he is.
Raj knows he's in love. He knows it every second he smiles when she talks to him or says good morning Rajkumar, in that sweet voice he dreams about more often lately.
So now, our Male Lead is on a mission to GET OUT OF LOVE.
This relationship holds too many green flags!
Painful. Also doesn't allow him to be hypocritical for more than three seconds. Horrid, really.
And in the background is the Reddy family. It's not an easy home. It's never been easy with all that power and wealth involved. There's too much scheming and engineering in one place.
There's an overlooked half-brother that literally descended from hell, a sweet twin sister that has more than her fair share of buried grudges to Raj (and vice versa), and a patriarch that might be loving father and enabler all rolled into one.
There are traumas that our Male Lead wants to never remember.
You see that's the thing about Romance with Accountability. It can be sweet. It can be deadly.
Will our Male Lead manage to protect his secrets and secure the inheritance, or will his deepening emotions force him to confront his inner demons? Can greed truly give way to love? Or is that just something we only see in the movies?
Will he finally go to therapy?
A gripping tale of love, family, the high stakes of inheritance, and the journey to self - Shape of the Sun explores what happens with leads in a world where the rest are left to silence.
Read a sample here.
Shape of the Sun is available at Amazon, Kobo and Apple Books.
Book Excerpt
Adrift
An hour ago
Rajkumar woke up in the dead of the night. He could hear his own breathing, loud enough to deafen his ears. Or maybe it was the thumping of his heart that he could feel pulsating from his throat.
He had been awake for ten minutes and paralyzed on the bed, the darkness affixing him to the bed. It pressed upon him and made his vision flash black and white, reminiscent of what it did that terrible night.
He was afraid. He didn't know what to do.
Thump. Thump.
Those were Eloise's footsteps. No, it was his heart galloping like a deer caught in headlights. It wasn't. It was. It wasn't.
Rajkumar scrambled for the bedside lamp and pressed down so hard, the sound went thud against the walls of his heart. But he didn't care. He didn't have the capacity to, tender mind on autopilot, racing away from the demons that found their way in and built their nest.
The light gently flooding the room put them to rest. But it was only for a while. He could hide from those demons, ghosts of the days past, but not from himself.
The standing mirror on his far left was telling.
Rajkumar couldn't recognize the boy that he saw there. So similar, yet not. He had lost so much weight in just a few days. The boy in the mirror was disheveled, eyes reddish from crying, a litany of tears and mucus running his face that he hadn't even realized was there before, hollow like there was no life in there, and bones jutting out every part of his body, their sharp angles pronounced.
Perhaps they'd cut him from within. They would cut him like he wasn't already cut. Or perhaps, he wasn't cut. Not just yet. He was only crushed, shattered, trampled upon, that type of thing.
Rajkumar tried to smile. He pressed fingers to the corner of his lips and forced them to a curve all the way up. He tried to smile, a proxy for happiness.
But as it turned out, he couldn't even do just that. His smile came out uglier than crying, a proxy for the bottomless sadness inside of him. His eyes followed suit and released their torrent, so that he choked on his sobs, all the while careful not to be too loud. He silently cried in that corner of his bed, hands pressed to mouth.
The darkness scared him. But the light scared him even more.
He was lost, hopelessly lost at sea, drifting without an anchor, waves tossing in a battle for his soul. Rajkumar thought he was losing.
– Excerpted from Shape of the Sun by Paula Onohi Omokhomion, Independent, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
Paula Omokhomion is a Master of Public Policy student at the UC Riverside School of Public Policy, though she's fairly certain that won't be forever. She holds a B.S. in Public Health Nutrition from UNC Chapel Hill, where she also minored in Creative Writing (Fiction) and graduated with highest honors for her 120-page thesis novella, New Age Taffeta.
Paula developed her skills and love for writing fiction in a very, very interesting Nigerian boarding school, where the lack of television meant she had to invent entertainment for everyone else. She loves reading manhwa, watching Indian TV dramas, listening to music, and writing short stories.When not doing any of those or in the classroom handling R code, she's refining her LinkedIn or taking Instagram selfies.
She lives in California with her family, including her two fellow triplets, and is currently dreaming of a future PhD in public health—and maybe another novel.
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