House of Waiting is a wonderfully rendered and moving novel.
~Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize
Budhos makes vivid the conflicting loyalties of family, race and nation…with insight, humor and tenderness. A terrific debut.
~Rosellen Brown, author of The Day After and Civil Wars
House of Waiting is a sweeping, lyrical first novel by Marina Tamar Budhos that charts the stormy marriage between Sarah Weissberg, a sheltered New York woman of Orthodox Jewish parentage, and Roland Sing, a charismatic Indo-Caribbean man. The two are drawn together by their passion and a shared sense of being outsiders in 1950s America.
When Roland leaves his wife in New York almost immediately after their marriage to seek his destiny in a bitter political struggle in his native British Guiana, Sarah creates her own community with his East Indian friends in a summer house in upstate New York. Ultimately, she gains the strength to make a dangerous journey to the Caribbean to save her marriage and learn the truth about her husband.
Based on actual historical events, House of Waiting is a sensitively drawn tale about exile and love; a struggle against the past to forge a new home.
Marina Tamar Budhos’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Caribbean Writer and The Nation. She received the Emerging Writer Award from Kenyan Review and has been a Fulbright Scholar to India.
