Book Launch: Sutra Americana by Monona Wali

Join us for a conversation with author Monona Wali as she presents her novel Sutra Americana, the decades-long story of a close-knit Indian immigrant family who, in learning to be American, a complex and exhilarating project, find the threads of their relationships unravel. Weike Wang, author of Rental House writes: “The love in this luminous family saga is fierce and tested through the competing forces of devotion and reinvention.”

Monona will read and be in conversation with Neelanjana Banerjee, writer and Managing Editor of Kaya Press.

About the participants:

Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the Independent Book Publishers Gold award for multicultural fiction. Born in Benares, India, she now lives in Los Angeles, California.

Neelanjana Banerjee’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She is based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches creative writing in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University, and in the Literary Editing and Publishing Program at USC.

About the book:

In 1960 S. K. Sharma, a brilliant young astrophysicist at the beginning of his academic career, has finally succeeded in bringing his wife, Sushila, from India to America. Intensely drawn to one another as star university students, the couple pursue an unlikely affair and marriage that crosses caste lines. Their sweeping, decades-long story of love, forgiveness, and coming of age takes place in a country that is both fascinated by and shuns them. The United States, with its exaltation of individualism, offers immense opportunities, but its looser sexual mores threaten to undermine the family’s happiness and devotion to one another.

As their three daughters become young women, they must navigate the tumultuous decades of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the women’s liberation movement. In their journeys of self-discovery, they upend their parents’ hold on them to craft radically new identities for themselves. As they discover their parents’ faults they grow increasingly puzzled by their devotion to one another, eventually learning how love and forgiveness have the power to overcome the most uncomfortable truths.