Border Less

A Novel

By: Namrata Poddar

Narrated by: Deepti Gupta

Dia Mittal is an airline call center agent in Mumbai searching for an easier life. As her search takes her to the United States, Dia’s checkered relationship with the American Dream dialogues with the experiences and perspectives of a global South Asian community across the class spectrum—call center agents, travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, blue- and white-collar workers in the hospitality industry, junior and senior artists in Bollywood, hustling single mothers, academics, tourists in the Third World, refugees displaced by military superpowers, Marwari merchants and trade caravans of the Silk Road, among others. What connects the novel’s web of brown border-crossing characters is their quest for belonging and negotiation of power struggles, mediated by race, class, gender, nationality, age, or place. With its fragmented form, staccato rhythm, repetition, and play with English language, Border Less questions the “mainstream” Western novel and its assumptions of good storytelling.

Border Less was a finalist for The Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Chapters from the novel won the Short Story Contest organized by 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English, judged by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise; the New Asian Writing Prize; and appeared in The Best Asian Short Stories anthology. The opening chapter, in a slightly different form, was published in The Kenyon Review.

©2023 Namrata Poddar (P)2023 Spotify Audiobooks

Incredible

This was wonderful, I really enjoyed it. I hope everyone reads it I really liked the format. Each chapter has the tight construction of a short story but the whole book tells one cohesive story of the main character Dia and her extended family. it's about different generations of the immigrant experience to the U.S. from South Asia and conflict between those different experiences. It's about gender roles and women struggling to correct labor imbalances in their marriages. it's about searching for feelings of belonging when you are caught in between multiple cultures and places and identities. She ties in the experience of folks of South Asian descent who come to the U.S. by way of other places and identities. It's about the conflict between the struggle to find economic success and to be who you feel like you actually are. She also ties in characters of different economic classes. It was absolutely beautiful. I especially love the last chapter.