The Rootless Elysium - by Aatish Taseer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the author of A Return to Self comes an intimate meditation on identity and migration set against the backdrop of America's 250th anniversary that asks: in a nation built on motion and reinvention, can one ever truly feel at home?

Soon after becoming an American citizen, Aatish Taseer sets out from Chicago in a hulking Dodge Charger with no plan but a deadline: to reach the Pacific in ten days. What begins as a classic road trip along Route 66 quickly becomes something more searching and unsettled--a journey across a country, and into the fault lines of belonging itself.

Raised in India, shaped by life in the United Kingdom, and now rooted--uneasily--in the United States, Taseer travels west through small towns, fading cities, and vast interiors, encountering strangers whose lives refract the central question that haunts him: what does it mean to belong to a place that prides itself on being free of the past?

Moving between personal history and cultural inquiry, this is a meditation on migration, identity, and the fragile idea of America as a "creedal nation." Along the way, Taseer confronts the competing seductions of rootlessness and rootedness, the persistence of race and history beneath a myth of new beginnings, and the uneasy realization that exile is no longer temporary.

The Rootless Elysium is a thrilling update to the American road trip, mapping the country's many complications and contradictions from the inside out. Taseer transforms our highways and geographies into thresholds that reveal and recontextualize the country's spirit, with a chorus of artists and authors lighting the road ahead. It's a bottle rocket of a book: slim, powerful, and illuminating everything in its path.

Review Quotes

"A remarkable achievement. Taseer writes with shimmering, poetic precision, his erudition evident on every page of this interrogation of what it means to be American today, as we once again stress-test our democracy." --Peter Godwin, author of Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars

"Aatish Taseer writes hauntingly in a long tradition of the outsider looking in on America. He is alone, constantly adrift and grappling with the rootlessness of an expatriate experience in India, England and his adopted nation--the America of Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk--but also of James Baldwin and Saul Bellow. And like Alexis de Tocqueville, with his stranger's gaze, Taseer sees things invisible to others." --Kai Bird, author of American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

About the Author

AATISH TASEER is the author of the memoirs A Return to Self, long-listed for the NBCC Award for Nonfiction, and Stranger to History; the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were, The Temple-Goers, and Noon; and the memoir and travelogue The Twice-Born. He is a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.