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.
