Miss New India

Bharati Mukherjee

Mey 2011 · HarperCollins Canada

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Anjali Bose is “Miss New India.” Born into a traditional lower-middle-class family and living in a backwater town with an arranged marriage on the horizon, Anjali’s prospects don’t look great. But her ambition, charm and fluency in language do not go unnoticed by her charismatic and influential English teacher, Peter Champion (an expat American). And champion her Peter does, both to other powerful people who can help her along the way and to Anjali herself, stirring in her a desire to take charge of her own destiny.

So she sets off to Bangalore, India’s fastest growing major metropolis, and quickly falls in with an audacious and ambitious crowd of young people who have learned how to sound American by watching shows like Sex and the City and Seinfeld in order to get jobs as call centre service agents, which allow them to quickly out-earn their parents. And it is in this hightech city where Anjali—suddenly free from the traditional confines of class, caste, gender and more—is able to confront her past and reinvent herself. Of course, the seductive pull of modernity has a dark side, and it is those dangers that threaten Anjali’s transformation at every turn . . .

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BHARATI MUKHERJEE is the author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous essays on immigration and American culture and the co-author, with Clark Blaise, of two books of non-fiction. She is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Best Fiction. She has been a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1989. Follow Bharati on Twitter @missnewindia and become a fan on Facebook.