28 May 2026. A searing fictional odyssey through the fault lines of war, nationalism, and childhood innocence by one of India’s emerging literary voices
Award-winning author and peace advocate Dr Saniya Inamdar announces the release of her much-anticipated new novel, Peace Pretty Please: A Tale of Two Countries—a work of bold political fiction that dares to ask the most harrowing question of our time: What kind of world are we leaving for our children?
Steeped in historical consciousness and driven by an urgent moral imperative, Peace Pretty Please is a clarion call. With a nameless dead child as its protagonist, the book traverses some of the most shattering episodes of modern history—from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the horrors of 26/11, from the killing fields of Vietnam to the corridors of global power—weaving fact and fiction into a deeply affecting narrative that refuses to look away.
When Neighbours Become Enemies and Children Pay the Price
At the heart of the story stand two neighbouring countries locked in the familiar theatre of animosity, skirmishes, blame games, vituperative posturing, and an unending tug-of-war that, as the author writes, has become simply banal. Then a plague unlike any the world has seen arrives. Children, the most innocent and irreplaceable of all, begin to die. Not from a known disease or virus. They die in what resembles an epidemic without a cause, a murrain without a pathogen, an extinction that defies reason.
Is it a natural calamity? A conspiracy? Or is it the universe’s final, desperate demand for peace?
As the death toll mounts and threatens to cross borders, potentially leaving the entire earth devoid of its next generation, the two countries are forced to confront a truth they have long evaded: that their battles, born of ego, ideology, religion, and nationalism, carry a price too devastating to comprehend.
Peace Pretty Please does not offer easy answers. It offers something rarer and more powerful—a mirror.
A Personal Reckoning, A Universal Message
Dr Inamdar’s journey to this book spans decades. It began, in her own words, with a simple article she wrote at 21, published two years later in The Hitavada, Nagpur’s prominent English daily, in the winter of 1998. Titled ‘Man Needs a Reason to Fight’, the piece articulated a belief that has never left her: war, whether between nations, communities, or within the self, is rooted in unresolved ego and unexamined identity.
“Learn to be at peace with yourself and your ideas,” she reflects. “Do not impose them on others to satisfy your ego. That is one of the biggest battles. So if you have conquered your inner battle, you put an end to the war.”
That conviction found its first literary expression in her debut poetry collection Cornucopoem—a celebrated work that carried a foreword by former Miss Universe Sushmita Sen and included a poem mourning the children slaughtered in the Peshawar school massacre. That poem became the seed of Peace Pretty Please, a book dedicated to every child who has lost their life to war, terrorism, or human trafficking.
History on the Move
Peace, Pretty Please does not stay in one place in time, in geography, or in conscience. Real historical episodes move through the novel’s fictional world, some notorious, others half-forgotten, all carrying consequences that the present has not finished paying. The man who saved half the world and killed half its people makes his exit. A child runs through the fields of Vietnam. A wall comes down in Berlin. Mumbai bleeds.
None of the characters has a name. The atrocities do. That inversion is deliberate, and it is one of the novel’s quiet coups.
At the centre of it all is a dead child—a protagonist defined entirely by absence. It is a difficult narrative choice, and Dr Inamdar earns it. Silence, in this book, is not emptiness. It is the loudest argument the novel makes.
The writing holds together because Dr Inamdar brings two distinct abilities to the same page. Decades of work as a communicator give the political architecture its rigour. The poet in her—present since Cornucopoem—keeps the grief from hardening into polemic. The book is angrier than an elegy and more mournful than a treatise, which is precisely what makes it difficult to put down and harder to dismiss.
About the Author
Dr Saniya Inamdar is one of India’s emerging literary voices. Born in Kolkata, she was educated at some of the country’s finest institutions, Bishop Westcott Girls’ High School, Ranchi; Ashok Hall and Bhavans, Kolkata; and St. Joseph’s Convent, Nagpur, before completing her graduation from S.F.S. College, Nagpur, where she was awarded the prestigious Hiralal J. Kania Award for topping the University in History.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Journalism, and a Master of Mass Communication. She was conferred an Honorary Doctorate in Peacebuilding and Women’s Empowerment by Dunster Business School, Switzerland.
Her distinguished list of awards and recognitions includes an honour at the University of Oxford, Keble College, United Kingdom, for her contribution to women’s empowerment through literature; the Suraj Prakash Marwah Sahitya Ratan Award at the 8th Global Literature Festival, Noida; and recognition by the Honourable Governor of Maharashtra, Shri Bhagat Singh Koshiyari Ji, at Raj Bhavan, Mumbai.
Her previous novel, Panchaali: The Princess of Peace, cemented her reputation as a writer who brings erudition, compassion, and courage to the page in equal measure.
A Book for This Moment
In an era of resurgent nationalism, escalating geopolitical tensions, and a world still grappling with the aftermath of collective trauma, Peace Pretty Please: A Tale of Two Countries arrives with the force of necessity. It does not preach—it pleads. It does not moralise—it mourns. And in mourning, it opens a space for something the world urgently needs: the willingness to imagine peace not as a dream, but as a demand.
“Can you imagine a world without our children? Let the children live, and let your foolish fights about religion, nation, caste and isms die.”—Dr Saniya Inamdar
“Laced with nameless characters and with famous and infamous historical episodes, this book is an ode to peace and a fervent cry to humanity.”
buy this book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9373352474
