Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones: A Memoir

From a wry, insightful, and very funny new voice, here is one woman's peripatetic search for home, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Rome and, finally, to Los Angeles.

Priyanka Mattoo was born in the Himalayas, in a house with a clay-floored kitchen and no heat, as were most of her ancestors. In 1989, however, mounting violence in the region forced Mattoo's community to flee. The home into which her family poured their dreams was reduced to a pile of rubble. 

Mattoo never moved back to her beloved Kashmir—because it no longer existed. She and her family just kept packing and unpacking and moving on. In forty years, Mattoo accumulated thirty-two different addresses, and she chronicles her nomadic existence with wit, wisdom, and an inimitable eye for light within the darkest moments. She takes us from her grandparents' sprawling home in Srinagar, where her boisterous aunties raced through the halls; to Saudi Arabia, where friendships were gained and lost behind the sandstone walls of a foreigners' compound. We witness her courtship with a nice Jewish boy, now her husband, and her efforts to replicate her mother's Rogan Josh recipe via Zoom. And we are with her as she settles into her unlikely new homeland, Los Angeles, where she sets off on what is perhaps her most meaningful journey, that of becoming a writer.

Through these astonishingly poignant and often laugh-out-loud stories, Mattoo has given us an open-hearted, frank, revealing glimpse into a journey of almost constant motion, as well as a journey of self-discovery.