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These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women's lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power - a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner.
Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart.
In "Malliga Homes," selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students.
Sindya Bhanoo's haunting stories show us how immigrants' paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.
The tightness and brevity of these tales allow for a cohesive flow and focus that remains across the entire reading experience. That focus is demonstrated by the book's unifying themes of distance and connection. The collection's first story — "Malliga Homes" — tells the tale of an elderly woman who has been housed in a retirement village by her daughter Kamala, who immigrated to the United States. The theme of connection runs deeper than the issue of geography, as is best seen in the story "Nature Exchange." In this story, Veena is a woman in her 30s who lost her only child — a boy of seven — to a school shooting. Connection is tested in a different way in the story "A Life in America," in which an Indian professor at a U.S. college finds himself under fire from local newspapers...continued
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(Reviewed by Will Heath).
Sindya Bhanoo, author of the story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, writes about South Indian immigrant and diaspora communities and the connections people in them maintain (or lose) with family in India. Bhanoo, who lives in Texas, was born to immigrant parents in the United States. The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world and encompasses a wide range of cultures, languages and experiences. Below are a few additional works of fiction by Indian diaspora authors that cover all kinds of subjects and that have been reviewed and recommended on BookBrowse.
Girls Burn Brighter (2018) — Shobha Rao emigrated from India to the United States at age seven. She published the short story collection An Unrestored Woman in ...
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If you liked Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, try these:
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