A State of Freedom – A Novel - Hardcover

Mukherjee, Neel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393292908 ISBN 13: 9780393292909

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020

Synopsis

In this stunning novel, prize-winning author Neel Mukherjee wrests open the central, defining events of our century: displacement and migration. Five characters, in very different circumstances-from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, to a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city-find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire for more. Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives-formally daring, fierce, but full of pity-delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

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Review

An extraordinary achievement. Subtle and multilayered, it's a study of the brutality of social divisions, written with tremendous tenderness; a work that insists on the dignity of figures obliged to lead undignified lives. A powerful, troubling novel. The moment I finished it, I began it again.--Sarah Waters

Many of the sections are sprinkled with otherworldly moments and spectral figures, so that these narratives read almost like ghost stories, while others are rooted firmly in the achingly realistic, unequal, and unjust soil of modern day India.

This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity, a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece.--Edmund White

A compassionate, deeply felt tribute to India's forgotten people who strive to triumph over subjugation. With its mixture of prose styles and narrative voices, Mukherjee's novel is a literary achievement.

Exquisitely written, cleverly structured, powerfully resonant to the very last line...A profoundly intelligent and empathetic novel of privilege and poverty, advancement and entrapment.

Unsentimental, vivid, unsparing. Above all, there is compassion here...A calm, compelling, unshrinking portrait of humanity in transition; both disturbing and dazzling.

Without announcing his experimental intent too loudly, Mukherjee rips the meat of the novel (imagery, incident, social insight, feeling, mood) from the bones (narrative and character development in the usual sense) and feeds his readers only the richest pieces...Mukherjee looks straight at the ugliest parts of an unequal society and uses what he finds to construct something beautiful.

A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you've turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.--Karen Joy Fowler

Book Description

A novel of multiple narratives, set in contemporary India, the new book from Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author Neel Mukherjee explores the urge to escape the life we are given for something better

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0393292908
• ISBN 13: 9780393292909
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288