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by Amit Majmudar
When Mala and Ronak learn that their mother has only a few months to live, they are reluctantly pulled back into the midwestern world of their Indian immigrant parents - a diaspora of prosperous doctors and engineers who have successfully managed to keep faith with the old world while claiming the prizes of the new. More successfully than their children - equally ill at ease with Holi and Christmas, bhaji and barbecue, they are mysteries to their parents and themselves.
In the short time between diagnosis and deterioration, Mala sets about learning everything she can about her mother's art of Indian cooking. Perfecting the naan and the raita, the two confront their deepest divisions and failures and learn to speak as well as cook. But when Ronak hits upon the idea of selling their experience as a book and a TV documentary, India and America, immigrant and native-born are torn as never before.
With grace, acuity, and wry compassion, Amit Majmudar has written anew the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.
"Starred Review. The accumulated grievances of decades still erupt from time to time, but they are mostly subsumed by the simple, basic knowledge that the narrator has very little time left. She allows only occasional glimpses of the grim particulars, such as having fluids drained from her cancer-swollen belly. "This is not a book about dying," she informs us. "This is a book about life." Indeed it is, and not life airbrushed by sentimentality, but life as it is actually experienced by flawed human beings - perfectly rendered by their gifted author. Beautifully written and deeply moving." - Kirkus
"Majmudar's precise dialogue saves the novel from its few moments of sentimentality and makes the theme of the divide between immigrant parent and first-generation children seem surprisingly fresh. Powerful in its simplicity and honesty, The Abundance reminds us of the way our roots inevitably shape our adult selves." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Abundance was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amit Majmudar is the author of Partitions, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best debut novels of 2011 and by Booklist as one of the year's ten best works of historical fiction. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Best American Poetry 2011. A radiologist, he lives in Columbus, Ohio
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