Return to India: an immigrant memoir

by Shoba Narayan

Overview

Return to India is a brilliant and powerful memoir about what it means to be an immigrant in a foreign country and what propels immigrants to return to their homeland. Following in the tradition of her first book, Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes, award-winning author, Shoba Narayan explores themes of family, culture and identity.

In vivid and heartfelt prose, Shoba Narayan describes the trajectory of her immigrant life?from the salty plains of South India to the high rises of New York and Boston.

From the exhilarating thrill of being a new immigrant to becoming an angst-ridden mother grappling with hyphenated identities, Narayan describes the life of an immigrant with humor and insight. She talks about why she yearned for America and became a citizen of the land she would ultimately leave.

Return to India is about love and loss; about family and identity; and about the quest for a place called home. It is a powerful story about the costs of chasing the American dream and the complications of returning to your homeland.

Rich in detail and empathetic in tone, this book will resonate with immigrants and diaspora from all cultures.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045688918
Publisher:	Shoba Narayan
Publication date:	10/15/2012
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	675 KB

About the Author

Shoba Narayan dreams of being a trapeze artist or a stand-up comedienne, both of which are unrealistically ambitious given that she is galactically un-funny and clumsy to boot.

Meanwhile, she writes about food, travel, fashion, art and her native India for many publications. They include Condenast Traveler (US edition), The National, Financial Times, Destinasian, Gourmet, Time, Silkroad, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Town & Country, British Airways Highlife, Cathay Pacific's Discovery, Singapore Airlines' Silverkris, Knowledge@Wharton, Departures, Food & Wine, Saveur, Newsweek, Beliefnet and House Beautiful, among others. She is not sure why she said "among others" given that she has given a fairly exhaustive listing.

Shoba is a weekly columnist for Mint Lounge, an Indian business daily which is affiliated with the WSJ. She writes frequently for The National, based in Abu Dhabi. She does freelance features for a number of publications; and teaches an MBA course at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Shoba's essays and commentaries have appeared on NPR's All Things Considered Weekend. Her essay, The God of Small Feasts, that was published in Gourmet, won the James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. She is the author of a book, "Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes," published by Random House (US) in 2003. It was a finalist for a James Beard Award.

Shoba graduated from the Columbia Journalism School with a Master of Science degree. The school awarded her a Pulitzer Travelling Fellowship given to the top three graduating students in the class. She used her fellowship to travel to Israel. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Bangalore, India. She can be reached at [e-mail]