"Elegy for a Nation" is one of the most successful, acclaimed, and controversial works in the United States in 2020, if not the most successful. It topped more than twenty best-read lists and was chosen as the best book of 2020 by The Washington Post and the New York Public Library. It was also selected for the New York Times, Publisher Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, and Time magazine's lists of the 10 best books of 2020. It was a finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and won the 2021 American Book Award and the 2021 Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award. New York Times columnist Dwight Garner said of "I Choose" that it echoes "The Great Gatsby." "Akhtar" offers us a narrative voice describing a country where debt has corrupted many lives and cultural and moral values ¿¿have been sacrificed to the gods of money, where a television personality has become the new president, where immigrants live in fear of deportation, and where the trauma of 9/11 has resurfaced. Amidst all this, "Akhtar" attempts to understand and make sense of these events through his story of his Pakistani family and other immigrants, who are also trying to adapt and become American.