Habitations by Sheila Sundar

An Indian scholar moves from her home country to the United States, where she experiences first love, a green card marriage, single motherhood, and more in this "engaging novel, written with immediacy, warmth, and sharp humor" (Ha Jin, National Book Award–winning author of Waiting). Vega Gopalan is struggling. Still grieving the loss of her sister years ago, she heads to graduate school at Columbia University. In New York, Vega navigates through different worlds, eventually engaging in a series of relationships that take her through the competitive realm of academia, the isolation of the immigrant suburbs, and ultimately, the solitude of being a single mother. However, the birth of Vega's daughter raises the novel's central question: What does it mean to find a sense of belonging? With dry wit and piercing insight, Habitations is a personal story of identity, immigration, expectation and yearning, and of love discovered and lost. But it is also a universal story of womanhood