Family Life: A Novel - Hardcover

Sharma, Akhil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060055 ISBN 13: 9780393060058

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review and New York Magazine

"Gorgeously tender at its core…beautiful, heartstopping…Family Life really blazes." ―Sonali Deraniyagala, New York Times Book Review

Known for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.

Growing up in Delhi in 1978, eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju play cricket on the streets, eagerly waiting for the day they can join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more―until tragedy strikes. Young Ajay prays to a God he envisions as Superman, searching for direction amid the ruins of his family's new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.

About this title

About the Author

Akhil Sharma is the author of Family Life, a New York Times Best Book of the Year and the winner of the International DUBLIN Literary
Award and the Folio Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. A native of Delhi, he lives in New York City and teaches English at Rutgers University–Newark.

 

Reviews

*Starred Review* If the first rule of strong writing is, show, don’t tell (and it is), Sharma is a grand master, a black belt, an Olympic champion. Via the spare, guileless voice of protagonist Ajay Mishra, we travel the entire 7,000-mile journey from New Delhi to New York in his shoes as his family—father, mother, brother Birju, and he—arrives and settles in America. There is the joyous, even hopeful dispensing of household goods and favorite toys that can’t make the plane trip. The surprised delight of reading the exotic ingredients on the labels of canned goods in American supermarkets. The breathless anticipation of Birju’s acceptance into a prestigious prep school. Then, after Birju suffers a tragic accident, the suctioning from their lives of all that hope, joy, delight, and anticipation. This is not just the double-whammy smack of reality á la strangers in a strange land. It is a multiple-whammy, full-body smackdown that ramps up the bizarreness of their new world by adding tragic, harrowing circumstances. As extreme as the family’s misfortunes become, Sharma’s seemingly effortless prose transcends any disbelief, and his characters and their experiences will linger in the mind’s recesses long after the last page is read. --Donna Chavez

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393060055
• ISBN 13: 9780393060058
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224