Family Life

by Akhil Sharma

Overview

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review and New York Magazine

"Gorgeously tender at its core…beautiful, heartstopping…Family Life really blazes." —Sonali Deraniyagala, New York Times Book Review

Known for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.

Growing up in Delhi in 1978, eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju play cricket on the streets, eagerly waiting for the day they can join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more—until tragedy strikes. Young Ajay prays to a God he envisions as Superman, searching for direction 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393060058
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/07/2014
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

 

Editorial Reviews

…deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core…Family Life is devastating as it reveals how love becomes warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst of huge grief. But it also gives us beautiful, heart-stopping scenes where love in the Mishra family finds air and ease…I found Family Life riveting in its portrayal of an immigrant community's response to loss…But where Family Life really blazes is in its handling of Mrs. Mishra's grief. Sharma is compassionate but unflinching as he tells of this mother's persistent and desperate efforts to cope over the years.

The New York Times Book Review - Sonali Deraniyagala

★ 12/09/2013
The immigrant experience has been documented in American literature since those first hardy souls landed at Plymouth, and as the immigrants keep coming, so too do their stories. Sharma (An Obedient Father), who acknowledges the autobiographical elements in his new novel, tells a simple but layered tale of assimilation and adaptation. The Mishras come to America in the late-1970s, the father first, in the wake of new U.S. immigration laws and the Indian Emergency, when the narrator, Ajay, is eight, and his brother Birju is 12. There are lovely scenes of their life in Delhi before they leave, the mother making wicks from the cotton in pill bottles, the parade of neighbors when their plane tickets to America arrive. Sharma captures the experience for Ajay of being transported to a different country: the thrill of limitless hot water flowing from a tap; the trauma of bullies at school; the magic of snow falling; watching Birju, the favored son, studying hours each day and spending entire weekends preparing for the entrance exam at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Then a terrible tragedy irreparably alters the family and their fortunes. Sharma skillfully uses this as another window into the Indian way of accepting and dealing with life. A loving portrait, both painful and honest. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"With his subtly drawn point of view—recreating the child’s perceptions but with the controlling sensibility of an adult intelligence—Sharma gives us a fully imagined world, both hard and consoling."

Boston Globe - Jon Garelick

"[F]ine and memorable."

NPR - Meg Wolitzer

"An unsentimental, powerful portrait of immigrant life from an author who has been compared to Dostoyevsky."

San Diego Magazine - Angela Carone

"Bracingly vivid… Has the ring of all devastatingly good writing: truth."

Elle - Molly Langmuir

"Gorgeous."

People - Kim Hubbard

"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

"Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender."

New York Times Book Review

"If it’s tragedy, why do I remember the jokes with such fondness? Most reviews of Family Life have adequately conveyed its harrowing cruelties. But since this Slate/Whiting project is intended to steer readers toward second novels they may have overlooked, I’d like to point out that beyond the sadness, the novel contains a deep, nourishing reservoir of grim humor, thanks to Ajay’s deadpan and dead-eyed perceptions."

Slate.com - Colson Whitehead

"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

"If you're the betting type, put money on it: National Book Award, Pulitzer, and the Book Critic Circle-thingy. Akhil's in the running for a hat trick."

Vice - Amie Barrodale

"Dark humor twines through Sharma’s unforgettable story of survival and its costs."

People - Mary Pols

2014-01-09
In Sharma's world, as in Leo Tolstoy's, unhappy families continue to be unhappy in different ways. In 1978, narrator Ajay's father emigrates from Delhi to New York to take a job as a clerk in a government agency, and a year later, his family joins him. Ajay's mother had been an economics teacher in India and must now adjust to lower career aspirations, while Ajay's older brother Birju experiences some academic success in middle school and qualifies to attend the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Tragically, just before Birju is about to begin at his new high school, he has an accident—he hits his head in a pool and stays unconscious underwater for three minutes, leading to severe brain damage that lasts throughout his life. This accident changes the entire dynamic for the Mishra family. First, they have to determine how to take care of Birju, and they eventually decide to buy a new home and have live-in help, a situation made more feasible when the family gets a $1 million insurance settlement. But the father becomes an alcoholic, in part owing to the new stresses brought about by Birju's medical needs, and the mother winds up taking a job in the garment industry for minor wages. Meanwhile, Ajay begins to feel some pressure to be the academic star, something he succeeds in by graduating first in his high school class—he eventually attends Princeton, studies economics and becomes an investment banker. Along the way, he becomes enamored with Ernest Hemingway and begins to write short stories about his family life in the reportorial and flat style of the author he so admires—a style Sharma also adheres to in the writing of his novel. A moving story of displacement and of the inevitable adjustments one must make when life circumstances change.

Kirkus Reviews

"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

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

Huffington Post - Maddie Crum

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

Entertainment Weekly - Stephen Lee

"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."

Salon - John Wray

"Outstanding…Every page is alive and surprising, proof of [Sharma’s] huge, unique talent."

David Sedaris

"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."

The Wall Street Journal

"An immigrant story like no other: funny and dark, unrelenting and above all, true."

Nell Freudenberger