Megha Majumdar

I think that there is a long tradition of books that are socially engaged fiction that seeks to respond to the world.

Um, and that feels rooted in our current world and, um,

There's, of course, a rich tradition in India, but there's also a really rich tradition in the U.S.

of socially engaged fiction.

So I would be very happy if my book was in conversation with those books.

Oh, there are so many.

You know, right away I'm thinking about books by Tayari Jones, books by Colson Whitehead.

that you might have read in Australia, too.

And then I'm thinking of, you know, subtler books, like I'm thinking about ways that feel like they're engaging injustice in many different ways.

Clairvay Watkins' novel, Goldfame Citrus, which is anticipating a kind of future state of injustice.

Books like

The Unpassing, which is a novel that came out last year by a writer called Chia Chia Lin, which I absolutely loved.

And that is engaging, again, in a really tender way with the injustice that a Taiwanese immigrant family in Alaska faces.

So yes, there are beautiful writers engaging with injustice.

Well, you know, that question makes me think about, I don't know if you read this novel called Dominicana by a writer called Angie Cruz, which came out a couple of years ago, I think.

And, you know, that was a book about an immigrant, a woman who was in New York and who, you know, wants to make this new life there, but has made huge sacrifices.

And again, I don't want to give away the end of that beautiful book.

But, you know, as an immigrant, she has left behind her mother.

She spent her days in solitude, which often tips over into loneliness.

I think so much of immigrant literature is where we have reckonings with the sacrifices that people make for chasing their ambitions, the extremely difficult choices that people make when they leave behind family and move somewhere.