An emotionally rich portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent. – “A full-hearted, brilliant debut of necessary beauty.” –Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and New York Times-bestseller Friday Black
Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting,
The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world, and its American diaspora, all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home.
Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Injam’s stories question what it means to have a home, to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as a people ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus to visit his parents as his fellow passengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son’s white classmate, with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small village in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, who lives with the ghosts of his son and wife. And a man preparing for his Green Card interview with the American woman he’s paid to marry him.
A
sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to America from India in his twenties.
The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal inquiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing a home he left behind before it was lost to him forever.
