She is the author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a biography of Allen Ginsberg that focuses on his time in India[1] and of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994.

[failed verification][3] Her book The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (2011) is a biography of Maryam Jameelah (born Margaret Marcus), a Jewish woman from New York who converted to Islam.

[4] In 2012, she wrote a critical review for The Wall Street Journal of Defender of the Realm, the Manchester-Reid biography of Winston Churchill.

[5] She is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh and lives in Brooklyn, Calcutta, and Goa.

[7] In 2016, she was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her book, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire.