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The Best Possible Experience

By: Nishanth Injam
Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Soneela Nankani
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Publisher's summary

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • An emotionally rich collection of short stories, painting a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent.

“A full-hearted, brilliant debut of necessary beauty.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of
Chain-Gang All-Stars and New York Times bestseller Friday Black

"Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.” —Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home.

Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam’s stories ques­tion what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way to visit his parents as his fellow pas­sengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son’s white classmate—with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small vil­lage in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him.

A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal in­quiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost

©2023 Nishanth Injam (P)2023 Random House Audio
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Critic reviews

2024, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Long-listed

2024, The Story Prize: Long-listed

“Stunning…Injam’s narratives strike a perfect balance of darkness and light.” New York Times Book Review

The Best Possible Experience is a full-hearted, brilliant debut full of necessary beauty. Injam writes of longing, of love, of home and of the Indian diaspora, and as one reads the stories, they find that together they create an epic mosaic of life.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black and Chain-Gang All-Stars

“An emotionally rich collection of short stories that paint a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora. Nishanth Injam’s stories prod at our understanding of home and departure with a classical elegance and modern eye. Beautiful at both the individual and collective levels, The Best Possible Experience is truly a profound debut.” —Chicago Review of Books, “12 Must Read Books of July 2023”

What listeners say about The Best Possible Experience

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No Happily Ever Afters

I enjoy reading and learning about other cultures. This book is unique in that there truly are no happily ever afters. That said, I still found it informative and enjoyable.

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excellent writing and reading

Great stories and well read you will love all of them. just great stories 👍

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