Habitations -- Sheila Sundar, Hardcover

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.

Author: Sheila Sundar
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 04/02/2024
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.30w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781668016107

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/19/2024
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2024
Booklist 03/01/2024 pg. 21
BookPage 04/01/2024

About the Author
Sheila Sundar is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi. She earned her MFA at Boston University. Her writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, and Crazyhorse. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and their three children. Habitationsis her debut novel.