Shumona Sinha was born in a Hindu middle-class family in Calcutta : her father was a professor of economics and her mother was a high school mathematics teacher.

[2] As an adolescent, Shumona was an avid reader, surrounded by books bought by her parents or offered by her maternal aunt, Ratna Basu, a scholar and translator of German into sanscrit.

[4] In 1995, at the age of 22, Shumona Sinha started learning French at Ramkrishna Mission School of Foreign Languages at Calcutta.

[12] The novel has become a part of scholarly programs to discuss the questions of identity, exile, writing as a woman, writing in a foreign language, the relationship between literature and politics, at the Notre Dame University in Chicago, a course conducted by Alison Rice, at the American University in Paris by Anne-Marie Picard and at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales by Tirthankar Chanda.

In her third novel Calcutta, published in January 2014, Shumona Sinha goes down the memory lane of a Bengali family to describe the violent political history of West Bengal.