Family Life
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.
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Akhil Sharma is the author of Family Life, a New York Times Best Book of the Year and the winner of the International DUBLIN Literary
Award and the Folio Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. A native of Delhi, he lives in New York City and teaches English at Rutgers University-Newark.
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
