by Anne Cherian
Requiem, Mass.
Anne Enright
The Forgotten Waltz
Jennifer Cody Epstein
The Painter from Shanghai
Betty Friedan
The Feminine Mystique
Stephen Greenblatt
The Swerve
Lawrence Hill
Someone Knows My Name
Ann Hood
The Red Thread
Dara Horn
All Other Nights
Pam Houston
Contents May Have Shifted
Mette Jakobsen
The Vanishing Act*
N. M. Kelby
White Truffles in Winter
Peg Kingman
Not Yet Drown’d
Nicole Krauss
The History of Love*
Don Lee
The Collective
Maaza Mengiste
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze
Daniyal Mueenuddin
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Liz Moore
Heft
Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea
Mary Roach
Packing for Mars
Johanna Skibsrud
The Sentimentalists
Jessica Shattuck
Perfect Life
Joan Silber
The Size of the World
Mary Helen Stefaniak
The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
Manil Suri
The Age of Shiva
Brady Udall
The Lonely Polygamist
Barry Unsworth
Sacred Hunger
Alexi Zentner
Touch
*Available only on the Norton Web site
More praise for
THE INVITATION
“Resonates with the poignancy of real life colliding with unmet expectations.”
—Book Passage
“Charming with wide appeal for anyone who enjoys a story of friendship or is interested in the Indian American culture.”
—Cleveland.com
“[A] thoughtful exploration on the struggle for identity.”
—Curled Up with a Good Book
“The requisite ingredients—jealousy, regret, conflict between traditional Indian values and modern American ones—are all here, yet in Cherian’s gorgeously embroidered tale, nothing turns out remotely like you’d expect.”
—Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly
“The Invitation is a hard, clear-eyed look at Indian culture in the United States, and how expectations change and morph. . . . Cherian does an amazing job developing each of these characters. . . . A wonderful, engaging story.”
—S. Krishna’s Books
“The characters are multifaceted and complicated, a precarious combination of Indian roots, American futures, and the mixed-in-between present in which each of them lives.”
—Story Circle Book Reviews
Copyright © 2012 by Anne Cherian
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First published as a Norton paperback 2013
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Manufacturing by Courier Westford
Book design by BTDnyc
Production manager: Louise Mattarelliano
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cherian, Anne.
The invitation : a novel / Anne Cherian. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-08160-2 (hardcover)
1. East Indians—United States—Fiction. 2. Immigrant families—United States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.H476I58 2012
813’.6—dc23
2011044658
ISBN 978-0-393-08405-4 ebook
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
