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A Great Country

by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

******PRE-ORDER NOW! Available for shipping or pick up on March 26th, 2024.

From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel in the tradition of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, exploring the ties and fractures of a close-knit Indian-American family in the aftermath of a violent encounter with the police.

Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.

For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member’s perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America?

For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, A Great Country explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.

in Fiction + Short Stories
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Published March 2024

Mariner Books

Hardcover, 256 pages

 

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“A deeply moving, layered portrait of the hopes, dreams and fears a family carries as ‘other’ in the face of the modern American Dream, where social currency and privilege threaten even the most basic of instincts: to protect one’s child at all costs. Shilpi Somaya Gowda has the incredible gift of telling poignant, empathetic stories that make us think differently about the world we live in, and A Great Country is no exception.”  — Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push and The Whispers