Atlas of Unknowns

In the wake of their mother's mysterious death, Linno and Anju Vallara are raised in Kerala by their father and grandmother. As a teenager, Anju wins a scholarship to a Manhattan prep school with an act of betrayal that severs her relationship with Linno, whose own future seems to hold little more than marriage. In New York, Anju is plunged into the elite world of her Hindu American host family, led by a well-known television personality and her fiendishly ambitious son, a Princeton dropout determined to make a documentary about Anju's life. But when Anju finds herself ensnared in her own lies, she runs away, helped by a stranger with hidden ties to her parents. Desperate to find Anju, Linno embarks on a journey of her own, towards her sister, and towards her mother, whose memory she has kept shrouded until now. Funny, sad, moving, expertly told, with impeccably rendered portraits of unforgettable families on two continents, this is a masterful evocation of two sisters whose bonds are powerfully tested, whose love provides the only reliable compass in a landscape of unknowns.