Nariman Vakeel, a seventy-nine-year-old Parsi widower, beset by Parkinson's disease and haunted by memories of the past, lives in a once-elegant apartment with his two middle-aged stepchildren. When his condition worsens he is forced to take up residence with Roxana, his own daughter, her husband, Yezad, and their two young sons. The effect of the new responsibility on Yezad, who is already besieged by financial worries, pushes him into a scheme of deception. This sets in motion a series of events - a great unravelling and a revelation of the family's lovetorn past - that leads to the narrative's final outcome.

Review

Set during the 1990s in an overcrowded and politically corrupt Bombay, Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters depicts a family being torn apart by lies, love, and its unresolved demons of the past. Nariman Vakeel is an aging patriarch whose advancing Parkinson's disease and its related complications threaten to destroy his large Parsi family. When Nariman breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden, his two stepchildren turn his care over to their half-sister, Roxanne, who lives in a two-room flat with her husband and two sons. What follows is each character's reaction to this situation, from Roxanne's husband's struggle to provide for his family without neglecting his conscience to their sons' coming of age in an era of uncertainty. Expertly interspersed between these dilemmas are Nariman's tortured remembrances of a forbidden love and its inescapable consequences ("no matter where you go in the world, there is only one story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different").

Family Matters is a compelling, emotional, and persuasive testimony to the importance of memories in every family's history. In a poetic style rich with detail, Mistry creates a world where fate dances with free will, and the results are often more familiar than anyone would ever care to admit. --Gisele Toueg

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Encanto Books (pronunciation: /en-kan-toh/) represents a collection of approximately 5,000 first edition books acquired over a period of forty years. The collection is comprised primarily of hardcover fiction, but includes a sizable number of 1950?s and 1960?s pulp paperback publications as well. Spanning a timeframe from the 1930?s Depression era all the way up to the present day, the collection has something of interest for virtually any serious antiquarian. In searching the Encanto Books website, you will see that a majority of the books for sale are true first editions, first printings; tantalizing, many of these are signed editions, too. While the collection has great depth and scope overall, there is no denying that our greatest interest was reserved for finding books of a particular genre of fiction: mysteries. Encanto Books has succeeded in collecting virtually the entire output from some of the greatest American mystery writers ever. In perusing the website, you will see that in many cases you will not only have the opportunity to acquire the first book in a series about a gumshoe who straddles the legal line, but instead, rare first editions of the entire series.

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