About this item
Spanning more than half a century and cities from New Delhi to Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti's debut is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the Partition of India on the lives of three generations of women. The story begins in August 1947. Unrest plagues the streets of New Delhi leading up to the birth of the Muslim majority nation of Pakistan, and the Hindu majority nation of India. Sixteen-year-old Deepa navigates the changing politics of her home, finding solace in messages of intricate origami from her secret boyfriend Amir. Soon Amir flees with his family to Pakistan and a tragedy forces Deepa to leave the subcontinent forever. The story also begins sixty years later and half a world away, in Atlanta. While grieving both a pregnancy loss and the implosion of her marriage, Deepa's granddaughter Shan begins the search for her estranged grandmother, a prickly woman who had little interest in knowing her.
About the Author
Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and award-winning journalist based near Atlanta. Her collection of essays, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and her debut novel The Parted Earth will be published in the spring of 2021. Her writing about politics, social justice, and books has appeared in Harper's BAZAAR, ZORA, Courier Newsroom, Mic, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her work has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. A graduate of Duke University, Washington University School of Law, and the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, she teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University. Since 2017, Anjali has been working to get out the vote in Georgia's Asian American and Pacific Islander community. In 2019, she co-founded the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats. In the fall of 2020, she served on the Georgia Asian American and Pacific Islander Leadership Council for the Biden Harris campaign. A poll worker for Fulton County, she lives with her family outside of Atlanta.
