When January Feels Like Summer

Book excerpt: Five characters stumble toward the possibilities of being seen, being heard and being loved one unusually warm January day in Harlem. Devaun and Jeron are two young African-American men who are looking to earn respect in the neighborhood. Nirmala Singh and her brother, Ishan, run a small neighborhood grocery store. Nirmala's husband, Prasad, has been in a coma for three years after a robbery gone wrong. Ishan desperately wants gender reassignment surgery so he can transition to female, change his name to Indira and start a dating service. He wants Nirmala to pull the plug and cash in Prasad's million-dollar life insurance to fund his surgery. Devaun and Jeron's door-to-door poster campaign to make the neighborhood aware of a sex predator brings them into the store and the lives of Nirmala and Indira. Indira's first attempt at matchmaking is with Joe, a lonely neighboor sanitation worker with a crush on Nirmala. Meanwhile, Devoun is smitten with pre-op Indira, who agrees to go out on a date with him.