Mother India (A Novel)

Meena, a Jewish-American lesbian who has claimed India as her home, takes us into a darkly comic universe populated by three generations of women along with other family members, as well as by the Indians whose world they seek to penetrate.

There is Meena's religiously observant mother, Ma, whose desire to remove herself from the wheel of life plays out in a Faulknerian funeral procession and cremation on the banks of the Ganga; Meena's daughter, Maya, a misunderstood child coming of age in an emotionally treacherous household; her ex-wife, Geeta, a privileged and hedonistic Indian woman who enters their world with devastating consequences; Meena's twin brother, Shmelke, a charismatic rabbi turned guru and international fugitive; and the Indian servant, Manika, whose loyalty to the family both sustains and shackles them.

Universal yet intimate, brutal yet tender, satiric yet sympathetic, Mother India is Tova Reich's most poignant and astonishing novel yet.

TOVA REICH is the author of the novels One Hundred Philistine Foreskins, My Holocaust, The Jewish War, Master of the Return and Mara. Her stories, reviews, and other writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Atlantic, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award, as well as other prizes. She lives on the fringe of Washington, DC.

**Contents and Sample Pages**