In Miss New India, author Bharati Mukherjee takes readers inside the country’s conflicting worlds, where recent grad Anjali Bose is trapped between the life her parents want for her and the future that she imagines for herself in India’s fastest-growing city. Read by Farah Bala, the story is a traditional coming-of-age story with a few smart stops along the way.

After a violent encounter with her parents’ choice of prospective husband, Anjali leaves the tiny town where she grew up and hops a bus to Bangalore, where, she’s been told, success comes easy to the young Indians who work in call centers. She plans to reinvent herself — new name, new clothes, new life — by perfecting her English, experiencing the world, and leaving her past behind. Of course, as anyone who’s ever tried to escape their youth can tell you, that’s not always as easy as it sounds.

As she adjusts to her new life in Bangalore, Anjali’s feelings swing from determined and excited to terrified and — she is a teenage girl, after all — a little whiny. Narrator Farah Bala gives Anjali’s dialogue a wide range of emotion as she navigates the ups and downs of trading one life for another: from making friends and flirting with love interests to finding out what’s happened to the family she left at home, Anjali’s thoughts are as serious, passionate, anxious, and flighty as you’d expect. Along the way, a lively cast of characters weaves in and out of Anjali’s story, and Bala handles them all — American English teachers, a traditional landlady, shady acquaintances — with ease. Her impressive range of accents even allows her to layer one on top of the other for Indian characters pretending to be American in the call centers, all of which offers an intriguing look at the way U.S. culture is seen around the world. —Blythe Copeland