The Lives of Others

Mukherjee, Neel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393247902 ISBN 13: 9780393247909

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

The aging patriarch and matriarch of the Ghosh family preside over their large household, made up of their five adult children and their respective children, unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. Each set of family members occupies a floor of the home, in accordance to their standing within the family. Poisonous rivalries between sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business threaten to unravel bonds of kinship as social unrest brews in greater Indian society. This is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider. The eldest grandchild, Supratik, compelled by his idealism, becomes dangerously involved in extremist political activism--an action that further catalyzes the decay of the Ghosh home.

Ambitious, rich, and compassionate, The Lives of Others anatomizes the soul of a nation as it unfolds a family history, at the same time as it questions the nature of political action and the limits of empathy. It is a novel of unflinching power and emotional force.

Review:

Searing, savage, and deeply moving: an unforgettably vivid picture of a time of turmoil.--Amitav Ghosh

Finely observed.

Very ambitious and very successful...One of Mukherjee's great gifts is precisely his capacity to imagine the lives of others...Neel Mukherjee terrifies and delights us simultaneously.--A. S. Byatt

Masterful...His fierce intelligence and sophisticated storytelling combine to produce an unforgettable portrait of one family riven by the forces of history and their own desires.--Patrick Flanery

Rich and engrossing...Consistently vivid and well realized.--Theo Tait

A devastating portrayal of a decadent society and the inevitably violent uprising against it...ferocious, unsparing, and brutally honest.--Anita Desai

Haunting...Mukherjee can recall Tolstoy in his ability to bring to life a diverse and expansive set of characters and to sharply invoke interior worlds...[it's] a sophisticated meditation on suffering that invites empathy for characters who embrace violent ideologies as a result of injustice without ever vindicating the horrific violence they commit.--Hirsh Sawhney

Unfailingly beautiful...Resembles a tone poem in its dazzling orchestration of the crescendo of domestic racket. His eye is as acute as his ear: the physicality of people and objects is delineated with a hyper-aesthetic vividness.--Jane Shilling

Breathtakingly tense...the force of this journey hits you in waves.

Book Description:

An epic saga telling the story of a Bengali family in Calcutta – exploring a family that is decaying as the society around it fractures, and one young man who tries to reimagine his place in the world.