Nebraska: A Novel

A Masterful, Time-spanning Doorstopper
—Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"A dizzying, occasionally nausea-inducing masterwork that defies categorization or prurient interest . . . The flashes of insight about [Datta's] characters are brilliant, and frightening . . . the depictions of grief in Nebraska border on the transcendent."
—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

Anna Chatterjee has just been released from prison. Her husband, Prabir, has arrived to take her home and found her already gone; their flighty and artistic grown children, Neal and Nina are left to navigate the fallout both from Anna's disappearance and the trauma that splintered their lives years earlier. But as the story ricochets between past and present, the question looms: Where is Anna now?

As the story moves between decades and continents, Monica Datta considers the twentieth century experiment and its outcomes, often set against the testimony of the spritely Lacanian Jean-Louis Katz, whose life becomes entangled with their own as well as that of the Bengali psychoanalyst B.X. Roy.

With precision, range and deep emotional insight, Nebraska is an all-enveloping fictional experience not to be missed. It is a novel of characters who, while deeply separate, respond to the irresolvable questions that make us human.