Nebraska - by Monica Datta (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The captivating and tragicomic story of the Chatterjee family and the catastrophe that tore them apart--for fans of Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads.

Anna Chatterjee has just been released from prison. Her husband, Prabir, has arrived to take her home and found her already gone; their flighty and artistic grown children, Neal and Nina are left to navigate the fallout both from Anna's disappearance and the trauma that splintered their lives years earlier. But as the story ricochets between past and present, the question looms: Where is Anna now?

As the story moves between decades and continents, Monica Datta considers the twentieth century experiment and its outcomes, often set against the testimony of the spritely Lacanian Jean-Louis Katz, whose life becomes entangled with their own as well as that of the Bengali psychoanalyst B.X. Roy.

With precision, range and deep emotional insight, Nebraska is an all-enveloping fictional experience not to be missed. It is a novel of characters who, while deeply separate, respond to the irresolvable questions that make us human.

Review Quotes

"Astonishing. A marvel of storytelling. Monica Datta's Nebraska is made of the stuff of great and uncompromising ambition. An exploration of a family enduring the oceanic and the unthinkable, with meandering byways into everything imaginable, from Lacanian psychoanalysis to postcolonial architecture to Icelandic sheepdogs. A novel at once ferociously intelligent, humane, and bursting at the seams with splendor."
--Shobha Rao, author of Indian Country

"Datta has designed an intricate labyrinth that lures you in, while exposing unreachable corners of the human psyche. Compelling!"
--Ledia Xhoga, author of Misinterpretation

About the Author

Monica Datta is the author of Thieving Sun. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Conjunctions, The New Inquiry and many other journals. She has received funding from the Divided City/Mellon Foundation, the Faber Arts, Sciences, and Humanities Residency of Catalonia, The Fine Arts Work Center, the Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts, Kundiman, OPERA America and Sewanee Writers' Conference.