Winner of the Asian American Writers' Workshop Pages in Progress Prize
"A delightful and perceptive jaunt into the heart of the Indian American community of New Jersey, Edison is a charming, often hilarious novel brimming over with life, laughter, and dreams worthy of the most outrageous Bollywood movies."
—Chitra Divakaruni, author of Independence and Mistress of Spices
"A sparkling epic worthy of Bollywood's silver screens."
—Kirkus Reviews
Edison is a Bollywood-style epic tale brimming with song and dance, action and comedy, love and pathos, and cameos by dozens of real Indian stars of yesterday and today—a hilariously entertaining masala film in the guise of literary fiction.
Along the way, we glean bits of Bollywood history and fall in love with an improbable cast of characters that inhabits Edison's "Little India." Edison is a wild, romantic, laugh-out-loud love letter to the Indian American community of Edison, New Jersey, where author Pallavi Dixit grew up.
The unlikely star of Edison is Prem Kumar, the hapless youngest son of a titan of New Delhi industry. Obsessed with Hindi movies—what the world calls Bollywood—he is uninterested in joining the family business or marrying the spear-wielding heiress chosen by his father. He runs away to chase his filmmaking dreams in America, but his plans are immediately derailed. Instead, he finds himself crashing on a mattress and working at an Exxon gas station in the Indian immigrant community of Edison, New Jersey.
Although life is not going according to script, Prem finds a happy rhythm in this bewildering setting. When the beautiful and ambitious Leena Engineer bursts onto the scene, she and her grocery store–owning father upend Prem's short-term plan to do as little as possible, launching him on an epic adventure to make something of himself. Supported by an unruly cast of roommates, aunties, murderous yet orderly mobsters, and film stars at once glamorous and ludicrous, Prem test-drives the role of hero, and along the way, he witnesses around him the transformation of an ordinary suburb into a bustling "Little India."
