The American Distance

An immigration lawyer and a tech executive fall for each other just as she uncovers that the algorithm hurting her client was built by his own company.

The American Distance is a contemporary romance novel by Indian author Parvind Kumar. Maya Rao, an immigration lawyer fighting to keep her client Sofia from being deported over an unexplained fraud flag, collides — almost literally, over a spilled coffee — with Ethan Carter, a rising executive at the AI company behind the very software making that decision.

What begins as an accidental meeting becomes something neither of them planned for, even as Maya digs deeper into the system quietly mapping and selling the American public, and discovers the man she can't stop thinking about helped build it.

The novel follows Ethan's reckoning with what his company is really building, and Maya's own lesson that being right isn't always the same as being careful — a love story that refuses to look away from the country, and the systems, it's set inside.