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The East Indian by Brinda Charry wins Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction. 

Statement from the judges: 

'Within the obscure 1635 records of a prosperous Virginia planter named George Menefie resides a tantalizing historical fragment: a reference to a man named “Tony”—likely an indentured servant—born in the “East Indies” (today’s Indian subcontinent). In her exquisite and moving novel, The East Indian, Brinda Charry expands upon this elliptical archival find, imagining a complete life story for the elusive “Tony”—and by extension the other South Asians like him that ended up in Jamestown in the colony’s early years. The result is a picaresque tale that charts the varied voyages of a boy born to a Tamil mother in the coastal village of Armagon, site of one of the English East India Company’s first forts in South Asia. As the tides of history sweep over him, he is wrenched from his home and deposited across the ocean in London before finally washing up on the Virginia shore, where he labors in the tobacco fields alongside a motley collection of unfree laborers from Africa and Great Britain.

As the lone “East Indian” in a colonial society increasingly defined by a strict divide between white and Black, Tony begins his stay in Jamestown as the quintessential outsider. But as his encounters with the land and its peoples deepen, he eventually comes to think of America as his home—the place where he will be born again, will set down roots, and even start a family. “Like a snail,” Tony muses, “I will carry home on my back, find it where I happen to be, make it from what I bear inside me.” In telling Tony’s story, Brinda Charry offers us no less than a new origin story for America, a richly detailed panorama of loss, pain, struggle, and new beginnings.

Born and raised in India, Brinda Charry came to the United States in 1999 to pursue a doctorate in English literature at Syracuse University. She currently teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire.'