Nebraska

This tragicomic and intellectually ambitious story of the Chatterjee family and the disaster that tore them apart is an urgent new entry in the tradition of the family novel--for fans of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads. Anna Chatterjee has just been released from prison. Her husband, Prabir, has arrived to take her home and found her already gone; their flighty and artistic grown children, Neal and Nina are left to navigate the fallout both from Anna's disappearance and the trauma that splintered their lives years earlier. But as the story ricochets between past and present, the question looms: Where is Anna now? As the story moves between decades and continents, Monica Datta considers the twentieth century experiment and its outcomes, often set against the testimony of the spritely Lacanian Jean-Louis Katz, whose life becomes entangled with their own as well as that of the Bengali psychoanalyst B.X. Roy. With precision, range and deep emotional insight, Nebraska is an all-enveloping fictional experience not to be missed. It is a novel of characters who, while deeply separate, respond to the irresolvable questions that make us human.