Habitations

Vega Gopalan is adrift. Her sister died years earlier and she is still reeling from the loss when she leaves South India to attend graduate school at Columbia University. In New York she moves between very different worlds and drifts in and out of a series of relationships, including a first love and a green card marriage. Her path takes her through the competitive world of academia, the intellectual isolation of the immigrant suburbs, and eventually the loneliness of single motherhood.

The birth of her daughter brings the novel's central question into focus: what does it mean to make a home? Told with dry humor and sharp insight, Habitations is an intimate story of identity, immigration, expectation, and desire, and of love lost and found.

It is also a broader story about womanhood and the competing loyalties women are pushed to balance, to family, to community, and to themselves. The novel reflects on the many meanings of home and on how love and kinship can turn up in unfamiliar places. Habitations is by Sheila Sundar.