Habitations
A Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A young academic moves from India to the United States, where she navigates first love, a green card marriage, single motherhood, and more in this “delightful novel, written with immediacy, warmth, and wry humor” (Ha Jin, National Book Award–winning author of Waiting).
Vega Gopalan is adrift. Still reeling from the death of her sister years earlier, she leaves South India to attend graduate school at Columbia University. In New York, Vega straddles many different worlds, eventually moving in and out of a series of relationships that take her through the striving world of academia, the intellectual isolation of the immigrant suburbs, and, ultimately, the loneliness of single motherhood. But it is the birth of Vega’s daughter that forces the novel’s central question: What does it mean to make a home?
Written with dry humor and searing insight, Habitations is an intimate story of identity, immigration, expectation and desire, and of love lost and found. But it is also a universal story of womanhood, and the ways in which women are forced to navigate multiple loyalties: to family, to community, and to themselves.
A profound meditation on the many meanings of home and on the ways love and kinship can be found, even in the most unfamiliar of places, Habitations introduces Sheila Sundar as an electrifying new voice in literary fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sundar debuts with an earnest meditation on an Indian American graduate student's grief, loneliness, and longing. Vega Gopalan unexpectedly gets pregnant while pursuing her PhD in reproductive rights. Her loveless marriage with Suresh lacks the passion she once felt for her college girlfriend Naomi, though she struggled with letting herself be emotionally vulnerable in that relationship as much as she does with Suresh. She traces the root of the problem to her grief over her younger sister Ashwini's death in India, where Vega grew up and where their parents still live. Vega was 17 when Ashwini died of a heart condition that could've been easily treated had the family lived in America. Now, having spent several years in the U.S., Vega has mixed feelings about the country's abundance of resources, given their asymmetrical accessibility, and she begins to reflect on her own privilege as a Brahmin in India. Sundar offers a fresh perspective on the pressures of motherhood and desire for self-fulfillment as Vega considers leaving Suresh and co-parenting with him. This leaves readers with much to chew on.