Foreign: A Novel of Land and Longing

Summary

A mother returns to her home country of India to bring back her runaway adolescent son and discovers anew the surprise and crises of the place she left behind.

Katya Misra leads a carefully constructed academic life in Seattle—until one evening, she learns her adolescent son Kabir has run away to India to find the father he has never met. Contemptuous of her mother country, Katya is determined to bring her son home.

Foreign then moves to a small Indian village gripped by an epidemic of farmers taking their own lives. Here, Katya finds Kabir in the care of the family of Bajirao Andhale, a farmer turned desperate from debt, drought, and the crushing costs it will take to get his daughter married. When Bajirao’s wife Gayatri-bai saves Kabir’s life, she in turn seeks Katya’s help to stop Bajirao from taking his own. As their fates intertwine, each must encounter the others’ struggles—and ask who truly belongs, and who must let go.

A reckoning with humanity’s neglect of those closest to the land, Foreign is an engrossing, achingly tender, and urgent depiction of modern-day India.