Saving Face: A Novel

People love a rags-to-riches story but hate a woman who lied to get ahead.

Ami Shah is on the brink of life-changing success. Her skin-care empire, Amala, is set for a dream acquisition by a Fortune 500 company, and she has just been nominated for the ChangeMakers Award, the most revered entrepreneurial honor. There's just one problem: she's a complete and utter fraud. 

Twenty years ago, abandoned orphan Monica Joseph made a decision that forever changed the course of her life—she stole her wealthy classmate's identity and moved abroad to build her life on someone else's name. For twenty years, she's managed to hide in plain sight…until an ambitious fledgling journalist sets out to write the inaugural full-length profile on her. With her carefully constructed persona and life's work now in jeopardy, Monica is left with no other choice: to cover up her tracks once and for all, she must return to the scene of the crime—and the one place she vowed never to revisit.

Home.

ISBN: 9780778368403
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: August 12, 2025

"A riveting exploration of cultural identity, ambition, and the consequences of choices made. Saving Face is a stunning portrait of a complex woman caught between privilege and poverty, truth and deception. An insightful, powerful, and deeply affecting novel that firmly establishes Shah as a major voice in contemporary fiction." —Paulette Kennedy, author of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport

"Mansi Shah does it again with a powerful exploration on finding your true identity and how far one woman would go in order to climb to the top. Saving Face is a deeply emotional and engrossing book with a Singapore setting that is brought to life in vivid detail." —Lyn Liao Butler, author of Someone Else's Life and The Tiger Mom's Tale

"A brilliant, thrilling ride that is beautifully illustrated and thought-provoking. An engrossing story about ambition, wealth, identity, and the weight of secrets, this novel immediately captivated me from the start and stayed with me long after turning the final page." —Namrata Patel, author of The Curious Secrets of Yesterday