HarperCollins is delighted to present Border Less A Novel by Namrata Poddar

jaseya.fazili@harpercollins.co.in | 29 July 2022

PRAISE FOR BORDER LESS

“An excellent, exciting debut, a novel that is not afraid to go

into dangerous spaces and ask difficult questions.

Border Less reimagines the experience of migration in

powerful, surprising, and memorable ways.”

—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, American Book Award winner

and author of The Last Queen

“Illuminating debut . . . The range of perspectives harnessed

announces Poddar as an exciting new voice in immigrant fiction.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A story that is made whole through its fragmentation. A thoughtful

exploration of what it means to belong.”

—BuzzFeed News

“Questions mainstream modes of storytelling. Her style, which

seems to draw on oral traditions, emphasizes repetition, rhythm

and reinvention.”

—Khabar

“This is an immigrant story and the reader, no matter their

heritage, will recognize similarities in family stories.”

—Booklist

“Border Less is a novel that invites the reader into the twists,

turns, and corkscrews of immigrant life.

Poddar has a sensitive touch to moving between

time, space, and generations to present a continuous portrait

of adventures and hardships in a racialized, Brown body.”

—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of This

Will Be My Undoing

“Namrata Poddar is a fierce storyteller, and Border Less has a

lively, singular cast of characters that burn in the memory.”

—Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana

“Border Less challenges the traditional form and aesthetic of the

western novel with a narrative of interconnected stories as layered

as the human experience itself”

—Aline Ohanesian, author of Orhan’s Inheritance

“Border Less is an intricate, dazzling tapestry that pulls threads

from past and present—from Mumbai to California—crossing

and blending stories and lives … In this novel, Namrata Poddar keeps

her eye on the individual heart while painting the most expansive

orbit; she is a masterful writer, bringing time and place to life

with vivid story and color and memorable wisdom.”

— Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of  Hieroglyphics

***

Dia Mittal is an airline call-center agent in Mumbai searching for a better 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, Afro-Asian refugees displaced by military superpowers, Marwari merchants in the Thar Desert, and trade caravans of the Silk Road, among others. What connects the novel’s web of border-crossing characters is their quest for belonging and a negotiation of power struggles, mediated by race, class, gender, nationality, age, or place.

With its fragmented form, staccato rhythm, repetition, and play with language, Namrata Poddar’s Border Less questions and challenges the assumptions of the “mainstream” Western novel.

***

Namrata Poddar, says: “The biggest reason pushing me to write Border Less was my yearning to see the women around me—as Mumbaikars, Marwaris or the post-9/11 urban immigrant—reflected in Anglophone writing by South Asian writers, here in North America or in the subcontinent.”

Rahul Soni, Executive Editor – Literary, says: “Border Less is an exciting, playful and powerful novel. The journeys its characters undertake across various borders, physical and otherwise, should strike a chord among discerning readers in India, much as it has in the West, and we’re very pleased to be publishing this brilliant addition to our literary fiction list.”

About the Author:

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli where she curates the series “Race, Power and Storytelling”, and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvnia, and an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA.

Twitter: @poddar_namrata; Instagram: @writerpoddar

About HarperCollins Publishers India:

HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live! Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Harvard University Press, Gallup Press, Oneworld, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet. HarperCollins India is now the recipient of five Publisher of the Year Awards – in 2021 and 2015 at the Publishing Next Industry Awards, and in 2021, 2018 and 2016 at Tata Literature Live. HarperCollins India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers.