The North American release of Sonora Jha’s debut Foreign illustrates just how much a writer’s narrative approach can evolve over the course of a career. Foreign, first published in India in 2013, a full decade prior to her lauded novel The Laughter, is an empathetic and detailed portrait of the Farmer’s Crisis in rural India. Beginning in the 1990s, numerous farmers died by suicide after years of failed crops and economic distress. While this event received little attention globally, the novel has a newer context now, as the crisis in India goes on in the midst of climate change, and American farmers across the Plains regions are suffering crises of their own. When the novel hones in on the farmers, including their perspectives, motivations, and pain, the writing is tender and careful and the characterizations shine. However, there are other characters in the story who fall flat by comparison, showing us that Foreign, while earnest, is very much a debut and far from the hallmark of Jha’s career.
Foreign opens with Indian emigrant Katya, celebrating a recent book launch with her white fiancé, only to have her celebrations interrupted by news from her ancestral home. Her teenage son, Kabir, has escaped his grandparents’ house and is nowhere to be found. Katya tracks her son to a remote Maharashtra village where he finds his biological father, Ammar, who works as an activist on behalf of the farming community. Kabir is desperate to get back to his roots and resolve unanswered questions about his lineage. He wants to know his father. Katya, meanwhile, resents Ammar for abandoning their burgeoning family and wants to protect her son from both paternal abandonment and the disappointment of a cruel world. But Kabir integrates quickly into this environment, growing attached to the farming village and the couple they stay with, Bajirao and Gayatri-bai Andhale. Slowly their stories become intertwined as the crisis rages on.
The novel, told in third person perspective, follows an alternating point of view structure. Katya is our protagonist, our outsider’s look into this world, the titular foreigner. Bajirao and Gayatri-bai both take on point of view chapters as well, and it is their chapters that convey most of the narrative’s emotional stakes and complex characterization. Bajirao struggles against financial and existential despair as he and his wife arrange their daughter’s marriage, and Gayatri-bai reconciles her feminine vulnerabilities with her strength as a matriarch. The two are pushed to their very limits, but their love for each other and their family keeps the narrative moving, and we as readers are fully invested in their cause, especially as a microcosm for the farmer’s crisis in general.
However, our original characters anchoring us to the story, Katya and Kabir, quickly fade into the background. While it is fitting for a novel about the farmer’s crisis to have outsider characters take a secondary role, the novel tries to present a dual narrative when it may have been better served with greater focus. Katya’s plight as a parent is relatable, as well as how quickly she comes to care for Bajirao and Gayatri-bai, but her conversations with Kabir feel increasingly one-note as well as the non-issue of her American fiance. Romantic tensions between Katya and Ammar mount, and she references her love for her fiance, Alec, on a few occasions, but he plays little role in the story and ultimately does not impact her decision-making. Katya’s conflicting feelings towards Ammar would have been just as understandable without a milquetoast man waiting for her at home.
The novel’s treatment of Kabir is another flaw. As a parent myself, I am loath to question the precociousness of children, but Kabir’s interest in the farmers and his boundless empathy read as almost cherubic. While Jha tries to balance this with Kabir’s callousness towards his own mother, he still reads as more of an idealistic figurehead rather than a well-rounded child character. Comparing this portrayal of a mother and son to Jha’s most recent novel, Intemperance, those characters feel fully realized and flawed in ways that can be attributed to their older ages, but also to more time and attention on their characterization, rather than diverting narrative space across numerous characters in a relatively short space.
Foreign is very much a complete story, and does well in centering the narrative of suffering farmers rather than honing in on the accessible outsider perspective. However, in trying to balance both, Jha must leave certain plot threads relatively unattended, and characterizations don’t extend as deeply as possible. In the 10-plus years since the novel’s initial debut, Jha has grown considerably as a writer, but there is still much to enjoy and appreciate in this early endeavor.
FICTION
Foreign
By Sonora Jha
HarperVia
Published on October 13, 2026
