Caught between a father who thought success and freedom could be found only in America and a grandfather who risked his life to guarantee such ideals in their homeland of India, twenty-three-year-old Rajiv Kothari is lost in a nation he has always called home and beckoned by the one his father left long ago. "Stealing the Ambassador" is a literary page-turner that blends the experiences of a first-generation Indian American with those of his immigrant father and revolutionary grandfather, their intertwined stories probing the balance between fiction and history, between old country and new, between fathers and sons. Following his father's sudden death, Rajiv finds himself alone and bewildered. As he attempts to reconstruct his father's life, he begins to better understand his own, and when he chances to meet a new Indian immigrant, eerily reminiscent of his own father, their uncanny interaction grants Rajiv insight into the euphoria that his father felt when he first arrived in the country and its gradual deterioration into frustrated estrangement.