<DIV>2010 <I>ForeWord</I> Book of the Year, Essay<BR>Silver Medalist, 2011 IPPY Awards in Multi-Cultural Adult Fiction<BR>2011 American Book Award<BR><BR><p>?Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane.”<I>San Francisco Chronicle</I></p><p>?Vaswani's voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique.”Chitra Banerjee</p><p><I>You Have Given Me a Country</I> is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as <I>The Color of Water</I>, <I>Running in the Family</I>, or <I>Motiba's Tatoos</I>, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.</p><p><B>Neela Vaswani</B> is the author of the short story collection <I>Where the Long Grass Bends</I> (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as <I>Epoch</I>, <I>Shenandoah</I>, and <I>Prairie Schooner</I>. She lives in New York City.</p><BR></DIV>