LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2014.
Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2014.
There are a lot of books about India, this is one of the best. It is a huge 500+ page family saga with a family tree in the front which you will need to refer to often. It covers some 70 years in the life of the Ghose family, once wealthy papermakers, now drowning in debt. They are a traditional family of arranged marriages and a hierarchical structure who, despite hard times, need to keep up appearances. But beneath the respectable surface there are, of course, tensions, rivalries, snobbery, jealousy and grudges. The story switches between characters and through time with only a rebellious left-wing grandson being given the first person. It is long and complicated and wonderful, totally absorbing with a good smattering of politics and culture amid the human drama. Highly recommended.
The Costa Judges said Mukherjee's novel was “politically charged, ambitious and sometimes harsh in its evocation of India, it teems with memorable characters and the complexities of family.”
Sarah Broadhurst
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The Lives of Others Synopsis
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award
Winner of the Encore Award
Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Longlisted for the IMPAC Prize
Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is a note.
At home, his family slowly begins to unravel. Poisonous rivalries grow, the once-thriving family business implodes and destructive secrets are unearthed. And all around them the sands are shifting as society fractures, for this is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change.
'Deeply moving' Amitav Ghosh
'Terrifies and delights' A S Byatt, Guardian
'Unforgettable' Daily Telegraph
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780099554486 |
| Publication date: |
8th January 2015 |
| Author: |
Neel Mukherjee |
| Publisher: |
Vintage an imprint of Random House |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
516 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
|
| Recommendations: |
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Neel Mukherjee Press Reviews
Neel Mukherjee has written an outstanding novel: compelling, compassionate and complex, vivid, musical and fierce. - Rose Tremain
A devastating portrayal of a decadent society and the inevitably violent uprising against it, in the tradition of such politically charged Indian literature as the work of Prem Chand, Manto and Mulk Raj Anand. It is ferocious, unsparing and brutally honest. - Anita Desai
About Neel Mukherjee
Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta and educated in Calcutta, Oxford, and Cambridge. He reviews fiction for The Times and Time Magazine Asia and has written for the TLS, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the New York Times, the Boston Review, the Sunday Telegraph and Biblio. He is also a contributing editor to the Boston Review. He divides his time between London and the USA. A Life Apart is his first novel.
More About Neel Mukherjee
