trailer by Prashant Bhargava, Khushi Films
From the publisher:
A poignant, funny, blazingly original debut novel about sisterhood, the tantalizing dream of America, and the secret histories and hilarious eccentricities of families everywhere.
In the wake of their mother’s mysterious death, Linno and Anju are raised in Kerala by their father, Melvin, a reluctant Christian prone to bouts of dyspepsia, and their grandmother, the superstitious and strong-willed Ammachi. When Anju wins a scholarship to a prestigious school in America, she seizes the opportunity, even though it means betraying her sister. In New York, Anju is plunged into the elite world of her Hindu American host family, led by a well-known television personality and her fiendishly ambitious son, a Princeton drop out determined to make a documentary about Anju’s life. But when Anju finds herself ensnared by her own lies, she runs away, helped by a kindly stranger with connections to Anju’s past.
Meanwhile, back in Kerala, Linno is undergoing a transformation of her own, rejecting the wealthy blind suitor with whom her father had sought to arrange her marriage and using her artistic gifts as a springboard to entrepreneurial success. When Anju goes missing, Linno strikes out farther still, with a scheme to procure a visa so that she can travel to America to search for her vanished sister.
The convergence of their journeys—toward each other, toward America, toward a new understanding of self and country, and toward a heartbreaking mystery long buried in their shared past—brings to life a predicament that is at once modern and timeless: the hunger for independence and the longing for home; the need to preserve the past and the yearning to break away from it.
- shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
- a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year 2009
- a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick
- a New York Times Editor’s Choice
- Australia’s Big Book Club September Selection
- Foreign rights to Atlas of Unknowns have been sold in eight countries
Click here to read an excerpt from Atlas of Unknowns (downloadable pdf)
Author Praise:
Tania James comes at you like everyone you’ve ever cared about, like everyone you’ve ever lost. Wise and hilarious her ATLAS is an astonishment of a debut, so radiant with life, with love, with good old human struggle that I had trouble detaching myself from its pages. James’s prevaricating bikini-waxing husband-dodging beautiful-crazy sisters followed me into my day, into my dreams. Take this book from someone, give it to someone–you will not go wrong. ATLAS is that damned good.
–Junot Diaz, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Atlas of Unknowns is a plain masterful debut from a gifted writer. Tania James is a natural born storyteller, and Atlas of Unknowns is the torn-between-two-continents family saga to prove it.”
–Nathan Englander, author of The Ministry of Special Cases and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
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