Critical Praise

"With her fiercely beautiful memoir, You Have Given Me a Country, Neela Vaswani takes her place among other great innovators of form --- Aleksandar Hemon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Ondaatje --- who write eloquently and ardently about the land of in-between. Vaswani’s extraordinary, inimitable book is part tender love letter to her Sindhi-Indian father and her Irish-Catholic mother and part razor-sharp, history-rich exploration of multicultural identity. What is most striking of all, perhaps, is the portrait that emerges of a keenly observant, big-hearted writer with talent to burn."

—Maud Casey, author of Genealogy

"So beautifully written. A lucid, recollected dream of wrenching change, violence, loss, and most of all love hard-gained and clung to across cultures, generations. Neela Vaswani writes as if she’s lived all these lives. Her sentences are as powerfully precise and startling as the best lyric poetry. Yet finally it is the people, their stories and voices, and the places they define, defining Vaswani’s own life as well, that ground it all. This book is a wonder, a whole world."

—Brad Watson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Aliens in the Prime of their Lives

"Mesmerizing and poetic, You Have Given Me a Country is a vital meditation on the spaces that connect one family and divide it, and on the intimate travels one young woman takes between cultures, continents, emotional landmarks, and historical milestones. Pitch-perfect, this memoir reaffirms Vaswani as an international author of distinctive voice and undeniable importance."

—Chandra Prasad, editor of Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience