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To schedule an interview, or to receive a journalist's review copy of MISS NEW INDIA,
please contact Ayesha Mirza at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via e-mail at <Ayesha.Mirza@hmhpub.com>
"Enchanting! Mukherjee's pitch-perfect ear for character and mood and
her story-telling gifts capture the exhilarating restlessness of a young Indian
woman's pursuit of happiness. Miss New India illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains."
-Amy Tan
"A tightly woven narrative about naïvete and personal growth in contemporary India. . . . Mukherjee explores Anjali's issues with understanding and sympathy." -Kirkus Reviews
"Each character fascinates, and every detail glints with irony and intent, as Mukherjee brilliantly choreographs her compelling protagonist's struggles against betrayal, violence, and corruption in a dazzling plot." -Booklist (starred)
A vividly imagined story of an ambitious small-town girl who flees an arranged marriage and seeks adventures - professional, social and sexual - in Bangalore.
At a time when the global nature of commerce, the boom in Information Technology and the large-scale outsourcing to India, are changing the cultural face of a generation of twenty-something Indians, MISS NEW INDIA encapsulates a moment in time with the story of Anjali Bose. Anjali is a street-smart, ambitious, irrepressibly optimistic, sometimes conniving, but always charming young woman who is trying to find her way in the ever-changing, consumer-driven, and modernizing world of Bangalore, India. She quickly falls in with an audacious and ambitious crowd of young people, who have learned how to sound American by watching shows like Seinfeld in order to get jobs as call-center service agents, where they are quickly able to out-earn their parents. And it is in this high-tech city where Anjali-suddenly free from the traditional confines of class, caste, gender, and more-is able to confront her past and reinvent herself. Of course, the seductive pull of modernity does not come without a dark side.
Mukherjee was drawn to write about a Bangalore-based call-center agent the first time that, in activating a credit card on the phone, she spoke to a female agent who introduced herself with a two-syllable, easy-to-pronounce American name, and who tried valiantly to disguise her Indian-English accent. She was captivated by the deliberate identity masking and was intrigued by the woman on the other end of the phone. In researching for the novel, Mukherjee visited Bangalore and interviewed scores of customer support agents, visited out-sourcing campuses, and spent hours with professionals in new niche fields of "accent-neutralization" and "accent-enhancement."
As with Avarind Adiga's The White Tiger, MISS NEW INDIA portrays a distinctly modern and fast-paced urban landscape, one that feels decidedly different from the exotic, spice-filled backdrops we typically associate with Indian novels. MISS NEW INDIA is as much about how the current outsourcing to India by US corporations and subsequent 'Americanization' has forced seismic ruptures in traditional middle class families, as it is the coming-of-age story of one exceptional - or perhaps exceptionally ordinary - small town girl.
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To schedule an interview, or to receive a journalist's review copy of MISS NEW INDIA,
please contact Ayesha Mirza at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via e-mail at <Ayesha.Mirza@hmhpub.com>
Tour cities: Bharati Mukherjee will be making appearances in the following
cities to promote MISS NEW INDIA: New York and San Francisco,
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MISS NEW INDIA
By Bharati Mukherjee
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: May 17, 2011
Price: $25.00
336 pp, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 0618646531
http://bit.ly/icbCbg
................................................................
Ayesha Mirza
Marketing Manager
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
215 Park Avenue South, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10003
p: 212.592.1121
f: 212.420.5850
e: Ayesha.Mirza@hmhpub.com
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