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  • Brown Man in White Light: An Immigrant Romance
    Deben Roy
    Book | Language: English | Category: Novel | Sub Category: Immigrant | Publisher: Parabaas | Publication Year: 2025 | Pages: 355 | ISBN(print): 978-1-946582-52-2 | Price: $ 18.95
    Review:

    “A powerful and nuanced story of belonging.” — Kirkus Reviews


    Brown Man in White Light is an immigrant’s story set in the United States after the events of September 11, when a nation previously friendly and welcoming of strangers suddenly turns hostile towards many people, including some within its own borders. Dedicated teacher and longtime U.S. resident Robi Sen faces difficult choices after his wife decides to go back home and the authorities begin to investigate his teaching practices, resulting in suspension from his university. How he comes to terms—moving back and forth between continents— with these various personal and professional losses is the stuff of today’s immigrant lives. No longer having to dig a living out of hardscrabble earth, yet faced with many of the same challenges, each man and woman must search for their own answers. Along the way, Robi finds love and loses it, seeks friendship and community, and arrives at an answer to what the words home and belonging might mean in the age of global citizenship. This is a novel that not only tells us how one man lives but shows us how we all may live. Like its central character, the novel is impassioned and perceptive, and the writing sparkles with insight and humor. The prose is simple and forceful, in the manner of the masters. Roy’s deft handling of language makes for a deceptively easy read, but the protagonist and his joys and sorrows linger in the reader’s mind a long time.

    Deben Roy is a pseudonym.

    Praise for Deben Roy: Deben Roy’s dazzling first novel chronicles the complicated life of a professor teaching in Iowa, while telling the broader story of immigration, love and loss, familial and community ties, university life, the bittersweet concept of home, and intellectual freedom in post 9-11 America. The prose throughout is beautifully wrought and bracingly immersive. Brown Man in White Light is a novel to savor, and I can’t wait to see what Deben Roy will do next.

    —Mary O’Connell, author of The Sharp Time and Dear Reader

    In fine, empathetic prose Roy brings to life the inner world of Robi Sen, an Indian-American professor at Iowa, as he navigates the many nuances of double-identity—immigrant/exile, husband/ lover—while traversing the familiar-unfamiliar terrains of love, memory, and loss. Breaking new ground in Indian-American writing in its examination of the peculiar and suspended world of the man in the middle—neither rootless nor at home, neither fully integrated nor an outcast—this book is as insightful in its politics as it is redeeming in its final analysis of the wry talents of the human spirit to grasp at, and find, meaning and even happiness in the new world. I loved it.

    —Devapriya Roy, author of The Vague Woman’s Handbook and Friends from College

    The great Indian American immigrant novel has been written: this is it. First-generation Indian Americans like me came to the USA for graduate school in growing numbers only after 1965, but their stories are rarely told, much less with such empathy, insight, and skill. The book’s protagonist does not seem conjured or made up; his inner life felt real as if informed and inspired by lived experiences of academia, dating, racial profiling, microaggressions, and loss. We come to inhabit his world and gain new perspectives on otherwise familiar topics, places, and cultures. The plot unfolds slowly towards a climax and then ebbs; the characters stay with you long after you turn the last page.

    —Arvind Kumar, Founding Editor, India Currents

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  • Brown Man in White Light: An Immigrant Romance Deben RoyNovel (Immigrant)$18.95
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