A mother returns to her home country of India to bring back her runaway adolescent son and discovers anew the surprise and crises of the place she left behind.
Katya Misra leads a carefully constructed academic life in Seattle--until one evening, she learns her adolescent son Kabir has run away to India to find the father he has never met. Contemptuous of her mother country, Katya is determined to bring her son home.
Foreign then moves to a small Indian village gripped by an epidemic of farmers taking their own lives. Here, Katya finds Kabir in the care of the family of Bajirao Andhale, a farmer turned desperate from debt, drought, and the crushing costs it will take to get his daughter married. When Bajirao's wife Gayatri-bai saves Kabir's life, she in turn seeks Katya's help to stop Bajirao from taking his own. As their fates intertwine, each must encounter the others' struggles--and ask who truly belongs, and who must let go.
A reckoning with humanity's neglect of those closest to the land, Foreign is an engrossing, achingly tender, and urgent depiction of modern-day India.
About the Author :
Sonora Jha is is the award-winning author of the novels The Laughter and Foreign as well as the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and literary anthologies, on the BBC, and elsewhere. Formerly a journalist in India and Singapore, she is now a Loyola Endowed Professor at Seattle University and lives in Seattle.
Review :
"Jha is an exceptionally sharp and empathetic chronicler of stories and people that morph form as they journey between countries. Her formidable skills, journalistic and literary, come brilliantly together in Foreign." - Kiran Desai, Booker Prize-winning author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
"Sonora Jha's Foreign moved me in the deepest places. A novel that bears bracing witness to the outrageous, enraging costs of racialized domination and capitalist exploitation, while simultaneously cultivating the seeds of hope and resistance. Katya moves between the worlds of American academia and Western privilege and the failing cotton farms of central India, on a quest to find her son that widens and deepens into a movement for justice and healing at a global scale. I was awed by the transformative love that powers Foreign, and I hope everyone reads this superb, lifeward story." - Karen Russell, bestselling author of The Antidote
"Foreign by Sonora Jha is a thrillingly fast-paced novel that dramatizes the biggest issues of our time: displacement, rural indebtedness, activism, and the fracturing of family life. This is a bold work that wears its research lightly." - Karan Mahajan, author of The Complex
