The Secret of Alicanto by Inder Verma
Inder Verma‘s The Secret of Alicanto is set against a sweep of locations including the sun-drenched streets of West Palm Beach, the cobblestoned grandeur of Lisbon and Porto and the leafy calm of Belmont, Massachusetts. This novel traces the life of Maria Francisca Oliveira, a Brazilian-born nurse and single mother of twins, as she navigates loss, longing, reinvention and unexpected love.
The book opens in the middle of the night, with Maria rocking her newborn twins, Peter and Lara, in the soft glow of a Little Mermaid night-light. It is a tender and domestic scene, and it establishes the quality that Verma sustains throughout: an attentiveness to the textures of lived experience. Maria reflexively reaches for the silver Alicanto pendant at her throat in moments of anxiety. This detail accumulates into something that feels less like fiction and more like life observed.
New Beginnings in Unexpected Places
Maria is complicated in exactly the ways most people are complicated: warm and resilient yet prone to self-doubt, fiercely competent at work while quietly uncertain about her own future. Abandoned by her husband Amir — an orthopedic surgeon who fled back to Pakistan upon learning of her pregnancy — she does not collapse into victimhood. Instead, she reorganizes her smaller apartment, befriends her colleagues, wins a raffle trip to Portugal and gets on with the business of raising two children on her own. There is something heroic about her. Verma shows her making her bed with fresh sheets, color-coding the twins’ sippy cups and finding joy in the mundane choreography of motherhood.
Maria meets Jerry Feinberg, a divorced American Professor at Harvard, in a hotel lobby in Porto. Their connection is tentative, then tender, then slowly real. Verma handles the romance with skill, resisting the temptation to accelerate or sentimentalize. Instead, the relationship builds the way actual relationships do: through phone calls, stolen visits, the negotiation of logistics and fears and the gradual merging of two separate lives. Jerry’s first chaotic morning in Maria’s apartment, navigating sippy cup color-coding and flying wooden blocks while Maria multitasks with the efficiency of a seasoned emergency room nurse, is both humorous and moving. It is the scene in which he falls fully in love.
The Symbol of Hope
The mythological Alicanto bird of the title functions throughout the novel as a symbol of Maria’s hopes and self-understanding. It recurs as Maria fingers the pendant and wonders about the future.
In its later chapters, the novel broadens its scope to encompass Maria’s work in gene therapy trials for children with beta thalassemia, Jerry’s academic life and the Feinberg family’s evolving domestic rhythms. These chapters have the warm, episodic quality of a family album, and they satisfy in the same way: not through dramatic crisis, but through the accumulation of ordinary moments given their full weight.
The Secret of Alicanto is a novel about the courage it takes to begin again. Verma tells that story with a warmth for his characters that radiates from every page.
About Inder Verma:
Inder Verma was born in India to a Punjabi family of teachers and educators. After obtaining his masters in biochemistry in India, he completed his doctoral studies in Molecular biology at the famed Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. Following a three-year stint as a post-doctoral fellow at MIT, Cambridge, he took a research position at The Salk Institute in La Jolla, a suburb of San Diego, California. After nearly four decades ofresearch in Cancer biology, Gene Therapy and Chronic inflammation and publishing nearly 400 scientific peer reviewed papers and dozens of editorials, he left science to pursue his long-term desire to write. His first novel Parallel Lives, a tale of courage, love and triumph of science, was published in 2022 to a critical acclaim. Inder Verma is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Member National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine and several other international societies. He is a proud father and grandfather of twin granddaughters. He lives with his Dutch wife of five decades in La Jolla, California.
