An engrossing portrait of an arranged marriage, from the prize-winning storyteller of Home and Difficult Daughters

Nina is a thirty-year-old English lecturer in New Delhi, struggling to make ends meet for herself and her widowed mother. She feels increasingly worried: What prospects does an impoverished girl have without a father to marry her off? Then, unexpectedly, a proposal arrives. Ananda is a dentist in Halifax, Canada. He has spent his twenties painstakingly building his career, and has had no time to get married. The two start to write to each other, then talk on the phone, and finally Ananda arrives to propose; at first uncertain, Nina eventually agrees.

When the two marry, she leaves her home and her country to build a new life with her husband. But there is always more to marriage than courtship. And as Nina discovers truths about her husband—both sexual and emotional—her fragile new life in Canada begins to unravel.

Poignant, funny and above all compassionate, The Immigrant is a wonderfully honest exploration of an arranged marriage, what it costs to start again and what we can never leave behind.