One day Bella the cow loses her voice. The other animals add their sounds to a stew which cures Bella.

Her parents are too busy to notice, but even they can't pretend it's not happening when they wake up a few days later to find their house on the banks of a lake. Night after night, the house moves and the family wakes to a new location. When Bella realises that her room at the top of the house is built from Grandpa's old boat, she finally knows what the house is looking for. It seeks the sea. So Bella dons the captain's hat her Grandpa has given her and guides the house safely to the shore, where finally they are home.

On a freezing night in the middle of a New York winter, a young immigrant is suddenly awakened by a fire in P. T. Barnum’s stable, where he works and sleeps, and soon finds himself at the center of a citywide arson investigation. Determined to clear his name and realize the dreams that inspired his hazardous voyage to America, he will change his identity many times, find himself mixed up with one of the city’s toughest and most enterprising gangs, and fall in love with a smart, headstrong, and beautiful woman. Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our hero struggles to build a life–and just to stay alive–on an epic journey that is at once unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience.

While many people see ‘home’ as the domestic sphere and place of belonging, it is hard to grasp its manifold implications, and even harder to provide a tidy definition of what it is. Over the past century, discussion of home and nation has been a highly complex matter, with broad political ramifications, including the realignment of nation-states and national boundaries. Against this backdrop, this book suggests that ‘home’ is constructed on the assumption that what it defines is constantly in flux and thus can never capture an objective perspective, an ultimate truth. Along these lines, Unreliable Truths offers a comparative literary approach to the construction of home and concomitant notions of uncertainty and unreliable narration in South Asian diasporic women’s literature from the UK, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Canada. Writers discussed in detail include Feroza Jussawalla, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Meera Syal, Farida Karodia, Shani Mootoo, Shobha Dé, and Oonya Kempadoo. With its focus on transcultural homes, Unreliable Truths goes beyond discussions of diaspora from an established postcolonial point of view and contributes with its investigation of transcultural unreliable narration to the representation of a g/local South Asian diaspora.

After discovery of a mouse in the house, larger and larger animals are sent in after one another, with increasingly chaotic results.