Sawhney’s debut novel, a coming-of-age tale mixing grief, violence, and extremism, follows the life of Indian-American teen Siddharth Arora as he deals with the death of his mother, political tensions at home, and attempts to fit in amongst the bored and troubled youth of his Connecticut suburb . . . With shifting teen angst colliding with his new, upturned reality, Sid becomes aware of his failings and mistakes as he discovers what it means to be loyal to the ones you love. This is a fantastic debut about growing up as an outsider in a divisive environment.—Publishers Weekly

A vivid portrait of second-generation immigrants living in suburban New England . . . Sawhney is pitch-perfect when describing the uneasy relationship between adolescents and their parents . . . There is much emotional truth in the author’s sensitive portrayal of the despair and rage that can simmer away throughout adolescence . . . Hirsh Sawhney’s quietly devastating conclusion is both unexpected and deeply moving.—Times Literary Supplement

A raw portrait of a motherless family . . . poetic . . . [Sawhney’s] characters are distinctive: They open up differently, more ominously, than American fiction’s best-known South Asians of the Northeast — Jhumpa Lahiri’s . . . [and] exhibit an outsider-ness without glamour.—Village Voice

Sawhney weaves together his own plot, with heartbreaking difficulties about confronting the complexity of identities, with nationally and locally important issues like Islamophobia, all painted on a southern Connecticut backdrop.—Connecticut Magazine

Sawhney manage[s] to convincingly portray the pain and stress of growing up in a fractured society.—The Telegraph India