Shanthi Sekaran expects to be "boxed in" with other Indian American writers, though she doesn't like the notion.

"After all," Sekaran was saying on the phone from her parents' Berkeley home, "I am an Indian American writer, and I do write about Indians and Indian Americans."

That's obvious – so what's the conflict?

"When an Indian American writer portrays India, a reader will already have seen five other portrayals in other books and inject what they've seen before," she explained. "That leads readers to overlook other aspects of an immigrant experience."

Sekaran needn't worry. Her debut novel, "The Prayer Room," stands apart from what she calls "the tidal wave of Indian literature from the 1990s." That body of work mainly recorded the life of the Indian diaspora – the immigration experience of Indians moving to the United States. Sekaran's book is more than that.

"The Prayer Room" (MacAdam/Cage, $14, 375 pages) is a poetically rendered, vignette-filled tale of cultural identity, family secrets and the search for self. It is The Bee Book Club's choice for November, and Sekaran will make a book club appearance Thursday at Borders Books on Sacramento's Fair Oaks Boulevard.

In the novel, George is a British scholar who in 1974 is doing research in Madras, India, where he meets and hastily marries a young Indian woman named Viji. The couple, practically strangers, soon move to England, live briefly with George's parents, then immigrate to California – Sacramento, as it happens – when George is offered a teaching job.

The "prayer room" of the title is literally a small room in their Sacramento house that Viji converts into a "puja" room – a sanctuary for solitude and meditation. It is filled with statues of Hindu deities and photographs of deceased family members.

Time passes. Viji has triplets. Later, life grows more complicated when George's boorish, widowed father arrives from England and moves in. Finally, Viji returns to India to visit relatives and leaves George a note, intimating she will never return. "I found myself in a life that was not mine," she writes to him.

Grounded in family

On the other hand, Sekaran's compass has always been true. She was born at Sutter Memorial Hospital, grew up in Sacramento, graduated from Rio Americano High School and earned bachelor's degrees in English literature and French, as well as a master's in South Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She then was accepted into the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars program in Baltimore.

One of her short stories, "Stalin," was included in the 2004 anthology "Best New American Stories." "The Prayer Room" began life as a short story and became a novel after three years of work.

Last year, Sekaran appeared with 40 other writers at Authors on the Move, a fundraising event sponsored by the Sacramento Public Library Foundation.

Sekaran, 32, has lived partly in England since 2004, working on a doctorate in creative writing. She and her family – husband Spencer and 21-month-old son Avinash – divide the year between England and Berkeley.

"It's my American base," she said of the latter.

But she remains loyal to her Sacramento roots. "The Prayer Room" is dedicated "to the house on Winding Creek Road and everyone who once lived there."

"That's the house I grew up in," she said. "My dad brought three of his sisters (and his father) to America in the 1970s. My aunts were young and were more like sisters to me. And there were my mom and two older brothers. We had a house full of people, and I was the 'baby.' I remember this constant action."

Praise for her work

"The Prayer Room" has enjoyed mostly positive buzz from critics, and no less a personage than National Book Award winner Julia Glass ("Three Junes") blurbed it enthusiastically.

Reached by phone at her New Hampshire home, Glass gave her book-jacket endorsement a bit of context.

"A lot of colorful, edgy American fiction is coming from the children of immigrants who moved here from countries literally halfway around the globe," she said.

Call The Bee's Allen Pierleoni, (916) 321-1128.