South Haven

"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
" T]his luminous debut...captures precisely the heartache of growing up."
--Library Journal, Top Spring Indie Fiction
"A powerful story...a universal look at the complexity of how people wrestle with guilt and blame amid tragic loss."
--New Haven Independent
" A] sensitive, poignant, resonating novel."
--Bookslut
"An unforgettable and unnerving tale of grief and migration."
--Largehearted Boy
Included in John Reed's list of Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2016 at Big Other
"Sawhney's portrait of childhood grief is complex and explosive, and it challenges the definition of "victim."
-- Minnesota Public Radio
"A son of Hindu immigrants from India grows up in a New England suburb, where he struggles to find his way after his mother dies, while his father becomes immersed in anti-Muslim fundamentalism."
--World Wide Work
"In his debut novel, South Haven, writer Hirsh Sawhney chose his native New Haven and suburbs as backdrop for this part tale of mourning, part coming-of-age story . . . Sawhney skillfully captures Siddharth s readjustment to a life without his mother. Much of this readjustment centers around the different and complex relationships Dissharth forms with the handful of friends he makes following his mother s death, his college-bound brother, the new woman in his Dad s life, and with his larger-than-life father, a radically opinionated academic who is caught between what it measn to be American and the culture he s left behind."
-- New Haven Magazine
"This book became insight into what the life of a South Asian family is like in suburbia here in the US. But it remained a sharp, sensitive comment on adolescence and how much we still struggle to do well by our youth. Sawhney leaves us with a good cliffhanger in the end which I admired. He didn't have to tell us how each character turned out in life but lets us imagine their further existence."
--WORD Bookstores, Staff pick

Siddharth Arora lives an ordinary life in the New England suburb of South Haven, but his childhood comes to a grinding halt when his mother dies in a car accident. Siddharth soon gravitates toward a group of adolescent bullies, drinking and smoking instead of drawing and swimming. He takes great pains to care for his depressive father, Mohan Lal, an immigrant who finds solace in the hateful Hindu fundamentalism of his homeland and cheers on Indian fanatics who murder innocent Muslims. When a new woman enters their lives, Siddharth and his father have a chance at a fresh start. They form a new family, hoping to leave their pain behind them.
South Haven is no simple coming-of-age tale or hero's journey, blurring the line between victim and victimizer and asking readers to contend with the lies we tell ourselves as we grieve and survive. Following in the tradition of narratives by Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, Sawhney draws upon the measured lyricism of postcolonial writers like Michael Ondaatje but brings to his subjects distinctly American irreverence and humor.
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