Almost Brown: A Memoir

This moving memoir from Gill (Eating Dirt) explores her experiences as a self-described “Indo-Saxon”—the daughter of a Punjabi Sikh man and a British woman—navigating tumultuous family relationships and feelings of cultural rootlessness. Raised in Canada and the U.S. by immigrant parents who struggled to understand both cultures, Gill ably addresses the cultural and racial tensions she faced inside and outside her home, especially those driven by her father, whose own upbringing in India and Kenya instilled beliefs that felt antithetical to the family’s American lifestyle (he “hit the ceiling” when Gill got her ears pierced). As a teen, Gill’s father abandoned the family and they fell out of touch for several years before reconnecting when she was an adult. In lyrical, near-poetic prose, Gill uses their relationship as a springboard to touch on themes of belonging and identity-making relevant to anyone who has ever struggled to place themselves within their own lineage. “I didn’t understand that we were a cup poured into a tide of generational wavelets, people leaving and starting over, each paying the toll in a new world by giving up a little bit of the old one,” Gill writes. Readers should expect to have their heartstrings tugged. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic. (June)