Seeking Fortune Elsewhere: Stories

By Sindya Bhanoo

These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner

Format: Paperback
Pages: 240

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*Winner of the 2022 New American Voices Award*
*Winner of the 2023 Oregon Book Award for Fiction*
*Winner of the Writers' League of Texas Book Award*

Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Finalist for the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction
Longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence
Longlisted for The Story Prize

Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart.

In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students.

Sindya Bhanoo’s haunting stories show us how immigrants’ paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.