Randa Jarrar & Padma Viswanathan

Co-sponsored by Harvard Book Store

This sparkling debut follows audacious Muslim teenager Nidali from her birth in Boston to her childhood in Kuwait, Egypt, and finally, Texas. As a a misfit living through calamitous times, Nidali is forced to continually re-negotiate her place as a person of Greek, Palestinian, Egyptian, and American origins, living in a kind of perpetual exile.

While the complexity and weight of Nidali’s cannot be overestimated, neither can the humor and insight with which the author tells this at once singular and universal tale.

Randa Jarrar’s short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Hunger Mountain, Duck & Herring, online, and in numerous anthologies. Her translations from the Arabic have appeared in numerous anthologies including Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers. She also translated the acclaimed Lebanese novel Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine (Saqi/Telegram Books). Check her out at: http://rockslinga.blogspot.com/

Spanning the lifetime of one woman (1896-1962), THE TOSS OF A LEMON brings us intimately into a Brahmin household, into an India we’ve never before seen. Married at ten, widowed at eighteen, left with two children, Sivakami must wear widow’s whites, shave her head, and touch no one from dawn to dusk. She is not allowed to remarry, and in the next sixty years she ventures outside her family compound only three times. She is extremely orthodox in her behavior except for one defiant act that sets the course of her children’s and grandchildren’s lives, twisting their fates in surprising, sometimes heartbreaking ways.

LIFE OF PI author Yann Martel raves, “THE TOSS OF A LEMON is a captivating novel that in relating the story of one Indian woman and her family tells the story of a changing society. Precisely and deftly written, constantly interesting, morally serious yet sympathetic — I challenge any reader to start reading this book and give up on it. It joins the company of the great novels on India.”

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