Shobha Rao: The Search for Home Is Universal
In this interview, Shobha Rao discusses how the search for home is universal, how books are a writer’s best friend, and more.
Shobha Rao moved to the United States from India at the age of seven. She is the author of the short story collection, An Unrestored Woman, and the novel, Girls Burn Brighter. Rao is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and was a Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School. Her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Girls Burn Brighter was long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Goodreads Choice Awards. She lives in San Francisco.
In this interview, Shobha discusses how a childhood conversation confused her, how the search for home is universal, how books are a writer's best friend, and more.
Name: Shobha Rao
Literary agent: Sandra Dijkstra
Book title: Indian Country
Publisher: Crown Publishing/Penguin Random House
Release date: August 5, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Previous titles: Girls Burn Brighter and An Unrestored Woman
Elevator pitch for the book: A suspicious death, a reckoning with Native land, and a marriage tested by history itself.
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What prompted you to write this book?
Soon after I moved to the United States at the age of seven, a little boy in my class asked me, “Where are you from?” I responded, “I’m Indian.” And he said, “Oh. What tribe are you in then?”
Tribe? I had no idea what he was asking but that is the question that prompted the writing of Indian Country. The fact that Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, and insisted that he’d landed in India, and thereby called the native inhabitants Indians, is a thing that will never lose its fascination for me.
Indian Country, then, is the physical location of the novel (southeastern Montana), but it is also a tribute to the small and large ways that we as human beings are connected by history, by its remains, and even by its mistakes.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
It took me seven years to write Indian Country. In that time, three entire novels were written and unceremoniously retired. Every idea at some point was reconceived and rewritten, except for the interstitial stories. They endured through all the revisions.
The interstitial stories explore the history of the two places in which my novel takes place – the Cotton River Valley and the Ganges River along the holy city of Varanasi, and the devastating effects colonialism and Manifest Destiny have had on these places. I love their mythic and fable-like feel. In the tumult of rejection and rewrite, the interstitial stories were my North Star.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
For me, it was surprising that the publishing process does not get easier. It becomes more familiar with each work, but not easier. Whether it’s editing or proofing or marketing, the process always presents new challenges.
I do love that though. The journey is never monotonous. Each new work compels a new approach. With Indian Country, given its unconventional storytelling style, the greatest and most surprising pleasure was witnessing the trust my publishing team placed in me. This trust, in turn, begets more daring.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Researching and writing a novel is to be suspended, for its entirety, in a state of awe, so I feel like I was surprised every day. One of the more pleasurable surprises was learning about a river’s sediment. Though I’ve always loved rivers, I’d never really thought about their sediment, and how important sedimentation levels are to the health of a river, its ecology, its flow, and even its sparkle!
I was so captivated by sediment that I made one of my main characters, Sagar, a hydraulic engineer specializing in sediment. When I think about the flow of our lives, and how they are akin to the flow of rivers, it seems to me that sediment is the solid and anchoring part of it; it is the measure of the love we receive and the love we give.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
By having my characters be immigrants, and as an immigrant myself, what I hope readers will come to understand is that the search for home is universal. The particulars are different, as are the pathways, but we all seek a place of rest, a place of meaning. The search is never easy, and it is even harder when the country to which our search leads us is not the country of our origin, and perhaps has a language we do not know, and perhaps has a people who do not want us. But just as the search for home is universal, so is the possibility of grace.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
I am tempted to advise the usual: Persevere, rewrite, read, don’t be bowed by rejection, don’t give up, but these days, I’ve been thinking something slightly different. I’ve been thinking of what literature has meant to me. Not just now, but since I was a child. And it is this: Books have been my closest friends. They saw me through childhood in an alien, unfamiliar country. They were my companions through the polar night of adolescence. And they have been steadfast and luminous in all the days of my adulthood.
So that is the advice I would give: Find a friend in books. Make them your constant companions. Turn to them, reach for them. And like the best of friends, they will never abandon you.
