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    South Haven: A Novel
    South Haven: A Novel
    South Haven: A Novel
    Ebook371 pages5 hours

    South Haven: A Novel

    By Hirsh Sawhney

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    “A vivid portrait of second-generation immigrants . . . Sawhney is pitch-perfect when describing the uneasy relationship between adolescents and their parents.” —The Times Literary Supplement
     
    Siddharth Arora lives an ordinary life in the New England suburb of South Haven, but his childhood comes to a grinding halt when his mother dies in a car accident. Siddharth soon gravitates toward a group of adolescent bullies, drinking, and smoking instead of drawing and swimming. He takes great pains to care for his depressive father, Mohan Lal, an immigrant who finds solace in the hateful Hindu fundamentalism of his homeland and cheers on Indian fanatics who murder innocent Muslims. When a new woman enters their lives, Siddharth and his father have a chance at a fresh start. They form a new family, hoping to leave their pain behind them.
     
    South Haven is no simple coming-of-age tale or hero’s journey, blurring the line between victim and victimizer and asking readers to contend with the lies we tell ourselves as we grieve and survive. Following in the tradition of narratives by Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz, Sawhney draws upon the measured lyricism of postcolonial writers like Michael Ondaatje but brings to his subjects distinctly American irreverence and humor.
     
    “An affecting tale of a family’s loss, a child’s grief, and the search for solace in all the wrong places. Hirsh Sawhney is an incandescent voice in fiction.” —Laila Lalami, Pulitzer Prize finalist
     
    “This luminous debut . . . captures precisely the heartache of growing up.” —Library Journal
     
    “A raw portrait of a motherless family . . . poetic.” —The Village Voice
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateApr 11, 2016
    ISBN9781617754579
    South Haven: A Novel
    Author

    Hirsh Sawhney

    Hirsh Sawhney's writing has appeared in the Indian Express, Outlook Traveller, the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and numerous other periodicals. He is the editor of Delhi Noir, a critically acclaimed anthology of original fiction, and is on the advisory board of Wasafiri, a London-based journal of international literature. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and teaches at Wesleyan University. South Haven, his debut novel, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

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    Reviews for South Haven

    3.5/5

    21 ratings7 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Honestly, I had no affection for this book or it's characters. There wasn't a single person that was relateable or even remotely likeable. Siddarth came closest as the victim of his untenable childhood situation.thanks to library thing for the advance read.
    • 5/5
      Compelling and believable characters, would make a good movie, works as regular fiction or YA. Loved the cover and the feel of the book, as well. Akashic Books are usually good. I’ve received several from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program and was lucky enough to be able to purchase several from their display table at Tucson Festival of Books last year.
    • 2/5
      This book was just not for me. I was drawn to the book by the premise, but felt that a good story was just out of reach for some reason. I felt no connection to the main characters. Every time I thought something was developing that would draw me into the story, it was either cut short or went in a completely other direction.
    • 2/5
      This book was just OK. Even on and off good. The problem I had is that I could not find any redeeming qualities in any of the 4 main characters. I don't mind depressing, or books that deal with imperfect characters (those are often the kind I most connect with), it was just that everyone seemed so uncompassionate and downright disrespectful and I just couldn't find anything I could relate to in any one of them. The writing was good, though. Even very captivating at times, but it was sort of on and off for me. I would try another book by this author in the future.
    • 4/5
      South Haven is a fairly slow-moving story, but that just makes it more believable. The main character Siddharth, changes significantly over the course of the book, but is still recognizable as the boy at the book's beginning about 4 years earlier. It's a story of growing pains, being the "other," culture clashes and family politics. The ending, deep-down I knew it was always coming, but it still made for a little shock none-the-less.
    • 2/5
      This book went up and down for me. I didn't like the beginning, some of the middle was ok, and I would have hated the ending if I had been at all invested in this book. Some have called this a coming of age story, but to me it was a pretty dull story of a boy and his father living a sort of depressing life somewhere in the suburbs of South Haven. It wasn't terribly interesting, and the one thing about the book that piqued my interest (Mohan Lal's increasingly disturbing interest in India's BJP party, and his hatred of Muslims) was brushed over fairly quickly. Since the story takes place in 1992, just months before the Hindu nationalists started bombing mosques in central India, and the Muslims retaliated by bombing Hindu temples, I was sure this book would touch on that, but it didn't. I wonder if the author had tried to include more of this in a rough draft only to be told by someone, "No one in the US knows about this, so who cares?" The book ends abruptly, and if I had liked it more, this would have ticked me off.I probably won't recommend this for purchase unless someone requests it. There are better so-called coming of age stories coming out every week.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed reading South Haven. The story was extremely well written. Siddharth struggles to growup while facing loss and the struggles of teenage years. The author also does a great job of tackling the young mans feelings of being a second generation immigrant and dealing with his fathers age and political views! I won my copy of South Haven from Library Thing.

    Book preview

    South Haven - Hirsh Sawhney

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