Border Less

“An excellent, exciting debut … powerful, surprising and memorable”

CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI

Dia Mittal is an airline call-center agent in Mumbai searching for a better life. As her search takes her to the United States, Dia’s checkered relationship with the American Dream dialogues with the experiences and perspectives of a global South Asian community across the class spectrum-call-center agents, travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, blue- and white-collar workers in the hospitality industry, junior and senior artists in Bollywood, hustling single mothers, academics, tourists in the Third World, Afro-Asian refugees displaced by military superpowers, Marwari merchants in the Thar Desert and trade caravans of the Silk Road, among others.

What connects the novel’s web of border-crossing characters is their quest for belonging and a negotiation of power struggles, mediated by race, class, gender, nationality, age, or place.

With its fragmented form, staccato rhythm, repetition, and play with English language, Namrata Poddar’s Border Less questions and challenges the assumptions of the “mainstream” Western novel.