Photo: Charlotte Jenks Lewis/Studio D

By Katherine Russell Rich
384 pages; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

What do you do when rotten luck leaves you speechless? After two bouts with cancer and the shock of getting fired, Katherine Russell Rich "no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I'd borrow someone else's." Dreaming in Hindi is the verbally and emotionally dazzling story of Rich's passage to India, where she tried to master an intricate foreign tongue—and became fluent in the language of human possibility.

• Read the prologue
  
• O's July 2009 review