Suketu Mehta

PRAISE FOR: THIS LAND IS OUR LAND: An Immigrant's Manifesto

“In an age of brutal anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, ‘This Land is Our Land’ offers a meticulously researched and deeply felt corrective to the public narrative of who today’s migrants are, why they are coming, and what economic and historical forces have propelled them from their homes into faraway lands. We are, and always have been, a planet on the move, Mehta observes…’This Land Is Our Land’ reads like an impassioned survey course on migration, laying bare the origins of mass migration in searing clarity.”

—The New York Times

“A withering rebuke to the anti-immigration rhetoric that has arisen in global politics in recent years… Mehta dismantles the narratives of populist ideologues in a fierce defense of global immigration.”

—“32 Books You Need to Read This Summer,” Time.com

“An urgent and impassioned call for why countries should accept more migrants… As the country heads into the 2020 presidential election, Mehta’s moving, cogent book can help us find a way forward.”

—Datebook, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Written 'in sorrow and anger,' this is a brilliant and urgently necessary book, eloquently making the case against bigotry and for all of us migrants—what we are not, who we are, and why we deserve to be welcomed, not feared."

—Salman Rushdie

"The must-read book for 2019. Suketu Mehta is one of our finest thinkers and writers on the subject of immigration. What begins as a journey that mixes just the right amount of humor, anger and bewilderment at the state of our nation, ends up with a surprising double-shot of hope. This is the rare book that is pragmatic and unsentimental, and yet oddly uplifting."

—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Lake Success 

"Mehta has written a compassionate and powerful plea on behalf of migrants that also reveals the deep forces that propel them on their journeys. He exposes the demeaning ways that migrants are treated around the world, and the very human aspirations that may lead them to acccept this dehumanization. In so doing, he gives us a searing indictment of those like Donald Trump who do so much to make their plight even worse."

—Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics

"A powerful, passionate, angry, and hopeful cry for sanity and justice by one of our finest writers. Mehta's heart-felt book is a much-needed and potent antidote to the anti-migrant rhetoric that has grown so threateningly loud of late. Let them come!"

—Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit, West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, among others.

"Suketu Mehta has written a burning indictment of anti-immigrant hypocrisy, and an affirmation of hope in the real America—the America where we treat each other as human beings with a common future, and not a faceless problem to be solved by walls and barbed wire. Rousing and immensely readable, it is an anthem for all of us."

—Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowland

"A fearless and brutally honest look at the rise and inevitable fall of national borders and those who seek to enforce them. This Land is Our Land lays bare the structural inequalities forcing millions of migrants to flee their countries of origin, and persuasively contends that powerful nations have an obligation to welcome those they have uprooted."

—Becca Heller, Refugee Rights Lawyer and MacArthur Fellow

“This is a fiercely and well told story by a patriotic American about the value and challenges of our most inspiring heroes:  Our immigrants.”

—Bob Kerrey, former US Senator and Governor of Nebraska

"This heavily researched and passionately argued work deconstructs American misbeliefs about immigration. The U.S. is better—not worse—because of immigration, says Mehta, whose Maximum City (2004) was a Pulitzer finalist. Modern immigration’s origins, correctly identified, are the earlier migrations of colonialist countries into sovereign nations and the forcible, often violent, removal of resources. Immigrants are only following their own wealth, necessary because its plundering often created destabilization. One of the world’s poorest countries, Haiti, was made so by France’s demand for payments of $40 billion in adjusted dollars merely to recognize the former colony’s sovereignty. Haiti paid for more than one hundred years, from 1825 to 1947; reparations requests have been ignored. This is just one of the many real-world immigration stories, past and present, included here. The author identifies the real problem as the fear of immigration, stoked by false narratives, and he encourages America to embrace what immigrants have to offer. An immigrant himself, Mehta weights his personal, readable manifesto with history and data. The result is a profound combination of disturbing, convincing, clear-eyed, and hopeful.

— Emily Dziuban, Booklist

PRAISE FOR:
MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found

Bombay native Mehta fills his kaleidoscopic portrait of “the biggest, fastest, richest city in India” with captivating moments of danger and dismay. Returning to Bombay (now known as Mumbai) from New York after a 21-year absence, Mehta is depressed by his beloved city’s transformation, now swelled to 18 million and choked by pollution. Investigating the city’s bloody 1992-1993 riots, he meets Hindus who massacred Muslims, and their leader, the notorious Godfather-like founder of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, Bal Thackeray, “the one man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in.” Daring to explore further the violent world of warring Hindu and Muslim gangs, Mehta travels into the city’s labyrinthine criminal underworld with tough top cop Ajay Lal, developing an uneasy familiarity with hit men who display no remorse for their crimes. Mehta likewise deploys a gritty documentary style when he investigates Bombay’s sex industry, profiling an alluring, doomed dancing girl and a cross-dressing male dancer who leads a strange double life. Mehta includes so-called “Bollywood” in his sweeping account of Bombay’s subcultures: he hilariously recounts, in diary style, day-to-day life on the set among the aging male stars of the action movie Mission Kashmir. Mehta, winner of a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Prize, is a gifted stylist. His sophisticated voice conveys postmodern Bombay with a carefully calibrated balance of wit and outrage, harking back to such great Victorian urban chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew while introducing the reader to much that is truly new and strange. 

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)

“Stunning. . . . A powerful, arresting work. . . . Marvelous.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review“Narrative reporting at its finest, probably the best work of nonfiction to come out of India in recent years. . . . Mehta succeeds so brilliantly in taking the pulse of this riotous urban jungle.”

—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world. “What Dickens did for London, what Joseph Mitchell did for New York City, Suketu Mehta has done for Bombay. . . . A candid, extensive, and wholly entertaining portrait.”

—SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

The ultimate insider’s view of Bombay, a roiling and vigorous account that delivers on a seemingly impossible challenge: how to limn the diversity and sprawl of such a place in a single book.”

—THE SEATTLE TIMES