Immigrant, Montana

A Novel

By: Amitava Kumar

Narrated by: Amitava Kumar

Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times notable book.

One of The New Yorker’s best books of the year.

Carrying a single suitcase, Kailash arrives in post-Reagan America from India to attend graduate school. As he begins to settle into American existence, Kailash comes under the indelible influence of a charismatic professor and also finds his life reshaped by a series of very different women with whom he recklessly falls in and out of love.  

Looking back on the formative period of his youth, Kailash’s wry, vivid perception of the world he is in, but never quite of, unfurls in a brilliant melding of anecdote and annotation, picture and text. Building a case for himself, both as a good man in spite of his flaws and as an American in defiance of his place of birth, Kailash weaves a story that is at its core an incandescent investigation of love - despite, beyond, and across dividing lines. 

©2018 Amitava Kumar (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Amitava Kumar's Immigrant, Montana is a beguiling meditation on memory and migration, sex and politics, ideas and art, and race and ambiguity. Part novel, part memoir, this book is as sly, charming, and deceptive as its passionate protagonist, a writer writing himself into being." (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer)

"There is a buoyant energy and hilarity to this account of an Indian student seeking the wide world through the women he meets, but one laughs with growing unease as a darker undercurrent is slowly revealed. An unusual, brave twist on the migrant's tale." (Kiran Desai, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss)

"Amitava Kumar's Immigrant, Montana is romantic, natural, gorgeously detailed, and painfully truthful about exile, grad school, sex, and the South Asian man. Few novels have captured the mental texture of immigration so accurately." (Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs)

rambling

the author seems obsessed with the word 'fuck'; both as a noun and a verb. I did not finish

Sex-Obsessed Grad Student Rambling

This was completely different than I expected! I thought it was going to be a great story about how a grad student from India finds success through his studies abroad. Instead, it was a series of ramblings that mostly involved crude sex obsessions and affairs. It was so incoherent, I couldn’t find a good reason to spend the time on finishing the book.

So very good

I’ve listened to it multiple times now. The author does such a great job narrating.