An evocative account of a year spent speaking, thinking, and dreaming in a foreign language. Having survived a serious illness, Katherine Russell Rich spontaneously joins a special language school in Rajasthan offering 'total immersion'. What follows is a year of linguistic adventure and cultural surprises in which Rich gradually sheds her foreignness, to discover a new country and a new way of communicating. A clever, lucid and funny memoir and a unique investigation into the science of language acquisition that shows what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.