You Have Given Me a Country

2010 *ForeWord* Book of the Year, Essay Silver Medalist, 2011 IPPY Awards in Multi-Cultural Adult Fiction 2011 American Book Award “Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane."*San Francisco Chronicle* “Vaswani's voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique."Chitra Banerjee *You Have Given Me a Country* is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as *The Color of Water*, *Running in the Family*, or *Motiba's Tatoos*, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family. **Neela Vaswani** is the author of the short story collection *Where the Long Grass Bends* (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as *Epoch*, *Shenandoah*, and *Prairie Schooner*. She lives in New York City.