Crossing Borders: Three Novels

Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, India, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty, and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of nonfiction and a previous novel. He is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. In 2016, Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (General Nonfiction) as well as a Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists. His latest book, Immigrant, Montana (Knopf), has been named one of New Yorker’s best books of the year. Carrying a single suitcase, Kailash arrives in post-Reagan America from India to attend graduate school. As he begins to settle into American existence, Kailash comes under the indelible influence of a charismatic professor, and also finds his life reshaped by a series of very different women with whom he recklessly falls in and out of love. Looking back on the formative period of his youth, Kailash’s wry, vivid perception of the world he is in, but never quite of, unfurls in a brilliant melding of anecdote and annotation, picture and text. Building a case for himself, both as a good man despite his flaws and as an American in defiance of his place of birth, Kailash weaves a story that is at its core an incandescent investigation of love—despite, beyond, and across dividing lines.

Amy Waldman's first novel, The Submission, was a national bestseller, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and the #1 Book of the Year for Entertainment Weekly and Esquire. She is a former bureau chief for The New York Times and national correspondent for The Atlantic. In Waldman´s novel A Door in the Earth (Little, Brown, and Co.) a young Afghan-American woman, a college senior in Northern California, discovers a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane that has become a bible for American engagement in the country. Inspired by it, she travels to a remote village in the land of her birth to join the work of Crane’s charitable foundation. When she arrives, she finds that Crane's maternity clinic, while grandly equipped, is mostly unstaffed and that the villagers are not as grateful as expected. Moreover, Crane's memoir appears to be littered with mistakes, or outright fabrications. As the reasons for her return crumble beneath her, the U.S. military, also drawn by Crane's book, turns up to pave the road to the village, bringing the war in their wake. After a fatal ambush, she must decide whether her loyalties lie with the villagers or the soldiers -- and she must determine her own relationship to the truth. In a starred review Kirkus Reviews said that “… Waldman delivers a breathtaking and achingly nuanced examination of the grays in a landscape where black and white answers have long been the only currency. A bone-chilling takedown of America's misguided use of soft power."

Helon Habila is the author of the novels, Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time, Oil on Water, and a nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls. His writing has won numerous awards including the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Windham-Campbell Prize. He is professor of creative writing at George Mason University. Travelers (W. W. Norton & Company) is his most recent novel. A Nigerian graduate student who has made his home in America knows what it means to strike out for new shores. When his wife proposes that he accompany her to Berlin, where she has been awarded a prestigious arts fellowship, he has his reservations. In Berlin, Habila’s central character finds himself thrown into contact with a community of African immigrants and refugees whose lives previously seemed distant from his own, but to which he is increasingly drawn. The walls between his privileged, secure existence and the stories of these other Africans on the move soon crumble, and his sense of identity begins to dissolve as he finds that he can no longer separate himself from others’ horrors, or from Africa. A lean, expansive, heart-rending exploration of loss and of connection, Travelers inscribes unforgettable signposts―both unsettling and luminous―marking the universal journey in pursuit of love and home.