Family Life (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic) - Hardcover

Sharma, Akhil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410470873 ISBN 13: 9781410470874

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2014

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

Like Jhumpa Lahiri, Akhil Sharma writes of the Indian immigrant experience with great empathy and a complete lack of sentimentality. --Ann Packer

It will cut your heart to pieces but it will also make you rejoice. --Gary Shteyngart

A nearly perfect novel. --Edmund White

Sharma is a rare master. --Kiran Desai

A loving portrait, both painful and honest.

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"

This is a wonderful novel by an excellent writer. Akhil Sharma's unsentimentality has the effect of making his writing uncommonly touching. --Mohsin Hamid"

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"

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: Thorndike Pr
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1410470873
• ISBN 13: 9781410470874
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 263