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A Life Apart
Neel Mukherjee
Award-winning debut novel with guaranteed excellent review coverage.
Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. But to do so, he must not only relive his entire past but also try and understand it. Moreover, he must make sense of his relationship with his mother – scarred, abusive and all-consuming.But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Instead he moves to London, where he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of illegal immigrants. However, the story that Ritwik writes to stave off his utter and complete loneliness – a Miss Gilby who teaches English, music and Western manners to the wife of educated zamindar – begins to find ghostly echoes in his life with his aged landlady, Anne Cameron.
And then, one night, in the badlands of King’s Cross, Ritwik runs into Zafar bin Hashm, suave, impossibly rich, unfathomable, possible arms dealer. What does the drive to redemption hold for lost Ritwik?
Set in 1970s and 80s India, 90s England and in the first decade of twentieth-century Bengal, A Life Apart is a scalding novel about dislocations and alienations, about the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories and about the consolations of storytelling. Above all, it is about the impossibilities of love.
Sales points
A Life Apart won The Vodafone Crossword Award 2009 (the equivalent of the Booker Prize in India).,Brilliant debut novel by one of India’s finest rising stars,Beautiful cover design.,A well connected author who will receive guaranteed excellent review coverage.
Constable
Hardback
Demy, 352 pp
Published 28th Jan 2010
ISBN: 9781849011013
Markets: UK C/Wealth ex Can,India
£12.99 £7.79
Hardback
Demy, 352 pp
Published 28th Jan 2010
ISBN: 9781849011013
Markets: UK C/Wealth ex Can,India
£12.99 £7.79
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Reviews
"Incisive and poetic, sensual and intelligent, a novel with great breadth, heart and courage."
Ali Smith
Ali Smith
"The writing ... has a sculptured clarity. Assured and fearless ... This is subtle, precise writing that penetrates character and motive with astringent humour."
The Times
The Times
"There are a lot of subtle cultural ironies in Neel Mukherjee"s debut novel, which is what makes the book such a delight ... A Life Apart is an elegant and accomplished debut, a novel of many shades. It blends the poignancy of a coming-of-age story with the rawer excitements of an urban thriller laced with sex and violence."
The Sunday Telegraph
The Sunday Telegraph
"Mukherjee deftly interweaves the worlds of the arms trade, sex workers, fruit pickers and the Daily Mail, while also casting a light on the economic policies of the Raj, communal violence and the fragility of relationships conducted under the glare of history. But he never loses sight of his characters and their emotional upheaval. The growing tension is expertly handled, the ending unsurprising yet completely devastating."
The Guardian
The Guardian
"Cleverly crafted and impeccably written, the book refuses to be put down till the end."
Marie Claire
Marie Claire
"Rich and nuanced ... Mukherjee is excellent on what motivates people to act the way they do."
Daily Telegraph
Daily Telegraph
"Brilliant and disturbing ... Instead of the cloying nostalgia that fills so much diasporic fiction, we have a hard, painful hatred, a desire to burn the past into the bitter ashes of the cremation-ground. ... Intensely imagined, densely populated ... the narrative is taut with possibility."
Biblio
Biblio
"The greatest strength of Mukherjee’s searing first novel is its astonishing ability to produce the literary equivalent of cinéma vérité, because he can uncannily capture a street, a smell, a snatch of song with wordplay that can sting your memories into a renaissance. But this is not to say that the novel is geo-culturally delimited; Mukherjee debuts impressively with a blistering pen that lacerates afresh every wounded recollection that it uncovers. ... A scorcher."
India Today
India Today
"Not very often do we come across a novel so intense and thoughtful, one that runs on so many levels simultaneously. ... [It] is an engaging and powerful work of art."
The Tribune
The Tribune
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