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 LiteraryAward 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.

Review

“Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender.”
- New York Times Book Review

“There's nothing like the pleasure of being devastated by a short novel. Like Jhumpa Lahiri, Akhil Sharma writes of the Indian immigrant experience with great empathy and a complete lack of sentimentality. Family Life is a dark and thrilling accomplishment by a wildly gifted writer.”
- Ann Packer

“Family Life will cut your heart to pieces but it will also make you rejoice. The language, the humor, the sophistication, the empathy, the insight―all signal a new kind of literature about families and the bonds with which they hold us tight.”
- Gary Shteyngart

“Bracingly vivid... Has the ring of all devastatingly good writing: truth.”
- Molly Langmuir, Elle

“Family Life is a terse, devastating account of growing up as a brilliant outsider in American culture. It is a nearly perfect novel.”
- Edmund White

“Sharma is a rare master at charting the frailties and failures, the cruelties and rages, the altering moods and contradictions, whims and perversities of a tragic cast of characters. But this most unsentimental writer leaves the reader, finally and surprisingly, moved.”
- Kiran Desai

“An immigrant story like no other: funny and dark, unrelenting and above all, true.”
- Nell Freudenberger

“A loving portrait, both painful and honest.”
- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“[F]ine and memorable.”
- Meg Wolitzer, NPR

“If you're the betting type, put money on it: National Book Award, Pulitzer, and the Book Critic Circle-thingy. Akhil's in the running for a hat trick.”
- Amie Barrodale, Vice

About this edition

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