Optional Practical Training
A Novel
by Shubha Sunder
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Mar 04 2025 | Archive Date Feb 28 2025
Talking about this book? Use #OptionalPracticalTraining #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 America
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.
Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.
Advance Praise
“A rich and blazingly layered portrait of a young woman fighting to not only be an artist, but fighting to discover a true sense of herself in a world that has so many ideas about how her life should be. This is a beautiful, and beautifully intimate, quest of a book”—Paul Yoon
“Gloriously inquisitive about an immigrant's peculiar position, at times delightfully combative, at other times wrenchingly gentle, Optional Practical Training is a novel that is always true to itself.”—Megha Majumdar
“Optional Practical Training is as sharp, bright, and subtle as a blade hidden up a sleeve. Before you know it, it has sliced clear through the ether of absurdity that is immigrant life.”—Namwali Serpell
“Shubha Sunder’s voice and storytelling are a delight—wry, poignant, and effortlessly engaging. Here is a fresh exploration of the cross-cultural experience. A timely and insightful novel that demands our attention.”—Weike Wang
“This story, fundamentally American as well as universal, is told in supple prose, with ease and grace, and gives a great deal of pleasure and insight.”—Ha Jin
Marketing Plan
National publicity campaign
Bookseller outreach campaign
Social media promotion
Targeted digital advertising
3-city author tour
National publicity campaign
Bookseller outreach campaign
Social media promotion
Targeted digital advertising
3-city author tour
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781644453247 |
| PRICE | $17.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Andrea D, Reviewer
A uniquely quiet yet searing exploration of racism, belonging, and the unseen struggles of immigrants navigating a foreign land.
Fresh out of college Pavitra arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a coveted high school teaching position in physics and math. Her student visa grants her twelve months of Optional Practical Training (OPT)—a brief window to gain work experience, to find her footing, to carve out a space in a country that welcomes her labor but not necessarily her presence.
She expects obstacles—visa paperwork, cultural adjustments, the challenge of proving herself in an unfamiliar system. But what she doesn’t anticipate is the loneliness, the quiet exclusions, the feeling of never quite being seen.
Through a series of sharply observed vignettes and conversations, OPT traces Pavitra’s journey as she searches for housing, for community, for a sense of security in a place that subtly—sometimes overtly—pushes back. Her daily existence is shaped by microaggressions that accumulate like fine dust, by the unspoken hierarchies that dictate who belongs and who remains on the margins. Yet through it all, Pavitra resists, questions, and persists.
A deeply moving, incisive debut, Optional Practical Training captures the tension between hope and disillusionment, privilege and invisibility, ambition and the quiet toll of simply trying to exist.
#ShubhaSubar #OptionalPracticalTraining #Greywolf #ImmigrantStories #TheWeightOfBelonging #QuietButPowerful
Reviewer 1540961
This was a great book! It focused on the post 9/11 america and world, and looked at it from the perspective of someone who americans were afraid of. It was a great perspective to view this event from. It was very interesting, covered a lot about racism, and fear, and a lot about the manipulation that american media does to trick and sway americans into believing a false narrative of the world. It is a scare tactic done by the govt.
Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!
