Family Life – A Novel - Softcover

Sharma, Akhil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393350606 ISBN 13: 9780393350609

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015

Synopsis

Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision. We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place 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

Review

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

Sharma spent 13 years writing this slim novel, and the effort shows in each lucid sentence and heartbreaking detail.--Stephen Lee

Surface simplicity and detachment are the hallmarks of this novel, but hidden within its small, unembellished container are great torrents of pity and grief. Sedulously scaled and crafted, it transforms the chaos of trauma into a glowing work of art.

Outstanding...Every page is alive and surprising, proof of [Sharma's] huge, unique talent.--David Sedaris

Riveting... Sharma is compassionate but unflinching.--Sonali Deraniyagala

Dark humor twines through Sharma's unforgettable story of survival and its costs.--Mary Pols

I lost all track of time while I was reading it, and felt by the end that I'd returned from a great and often harrowing journey... To my own surprise, I found myself renewed after reading it, and imbued with a feeling of hope.--John Wray

A heartbreaking novel-from-life... [Sharma] takes after Hemingway, as each word of his brilliant novel feels deliberate, and each line is quietly moving.--Maddie Crum

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

Book Description

Heart-wrenching and darkly comic, Akhil Sharma's Family Life - the Folio Prize-winning novel from the author of An Obedient Father - is the beautifully told story of a boy torn between duty and survival.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0393350606
• ISBN 13: 9780393350609
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240