Shilpi Somaya Gowda

From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel in the tradition of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, exploring the ties and fractures of a close-knit Indian-American family in the aftermath of a violent encounter with the police. Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple. For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member’s perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America? For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, A Great Country explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.

A Novel

A Great Country

Lindsay

Vikram pointed at him with his long index finger. “Exactly. When a community starts becoming successful, that is when the backlash starts. Nobody cared about opium in San Francisco until the Chinese started doing well. No one willingly gives up their place of privilege for someone new. You’ve got to scramble to get to the top, then fight to stay there. That’s why you need to get ahead of it, to protect yourself.”

A country whose global advantage was its diversity born of immigration was turning its back on what had made it great.

In a country of over one billion people, every single step in life was fraught with competition, with someone who wanted to elbow you aside or step on you to get ahead.

The idea of walking away from a privileged place by choice was inconceivable to him.

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