Mother Ocean Father Nation

Nishant Batsha is a writer of fiction and history. A Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, he received his doctorate in history from Columbia University.

"A brother and a sister learn about survival and secrets. Batsha balances his storytelling to examine the many ways we belong within, and break away from our families, societies, and homelands." - NPR

"[A] gut-wrenching journey through the complex intersection of family, identity, and the long arm of history." - Booklist

"A brilliant debut novel of contemporary displacement, destabilization, and shifting identity. Heartrending in its domestic drama, illuminating and instructive in its exploration of the political as personal, Mother Ocean Father Nation is a memorable work of fiction to place beside the work of Nishant Batsha's gifted contemporaries Mohsin Hamid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others bravely bearing witness to a world suddenly and tragically dividing into 'native-born' and 'refugees'-the overwhelming political drama of our time." - Joyce Carol Oates, author of Breathe

"A moving saga about the experience of Indian migrants in the South Pacific." - Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies

"A gorgeous and finely-wrought family story, and a meditation on migration, homeland and belonging in the long shadow of Empire. Batsha's characters live on the page, and he gives as much care to the fault lines of family as he does to those of race and class engineered by the colonial order. His novel is an act of testimony to the ways that societies fracture along those lines, and how families break apart and put themselves back together. This is at once a probing look at events of the not-so-distant past, and a beautiful work of fiction." - Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State