A Life Apart: A Novel

by Neel Mukherjee

Overview

"A brilliant first novel . . . shockingly good." —Rose Tremain, Daily Telegraph

Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. 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. The story that Ritwik writes to stave off his loneliness begins to find ghostly echoes in his own life. And, as present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352108
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/14/2016
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Neel Mukherjee is the author of four novels, including The Lives of Others, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; and A State of Freedom, a New York Times Notable Book. He divides his time between London, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/11/2016
Following his mother’s death, and soon after his father’s, protagonist Ritwik is surprised to find himself entirely alone in his Calcutta neighborhood at age 21, not nearly as happy as he’d hoped he’d be with his mother gone (she was both the “proudest” mother in the area and, seemingly, the most abusive, “always on the edge of fury,” if not in its throes). His loneliness follows him to rainy rural England, where a scholarship gets him two years in university, and then on to London, where he stays without working papers. Ritwik is unable to shake the trauma of his mother’s cruelty, punishing himself once she no longer can. Throughout this time, which is set in the early days of AIDS, Ritwik finds men with whom he can have brief, furtive encounters in bathroom stalls and on unlit backstreets, never learning their names, never allowing himself affection or trust. And yet he’s not without hope. Interspersed throughout the book are installments of Ritwik’s own forays into fiction, imagining one Miss Maud Gilby: a minor character from a Tagore novel and an intrepid, early 20th-century British woman intent on educating Indian women. Calcutta native Mukherjee (The Lives of Others) illuminates the crevices of shame and despair with his beautiful prose. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"An elegant and accomplished debut…blends the poignancy of a coming-of-age story with the rawer excitements of an urban thriller."

Sunday Telegraph

"The writing…has a sculptured clarity. Assured and fearless…This is subtle, precise writing that penetrates character and motive with astringent humor."

The Times (London) - Helen Dunmore

"In this brilliant mixture of history, philosophy and science, psychiatrist and historian George Makari explores the origins of our ideas about self and that ephemeral phenomenon, the mind…Insightful, thought-provoking and encyclopedic."

Nature

"Historical and contemporary, lit with flashes of magic and violence, this intriguing novel offers multifaceted portraits of India and England as seen from the perspective of a clever, burdened misfit."

Huffington Post

"Mukherjee writes wryly and wonderfully…deeply engaging and brilliantly observed."

The Independent

"In this brilliant mixture of history, philosophy and science, psychiatrist and historian George Makari explores the origins of our ideas about self and that ephemeral phenomenon, the mind…Insightful, thought-provoking and encyclopedic."

Nature Lib

★ 2016-02-18
Historical and contemporary, lit with flashes of magic and violence, this intriguing novel offers multifaceted portraits of India and England as seen from the perspective of a clever, burdened misfit. Released now in the U.S. after the success of his second novel, this prizewinning debut by Mukherjee (The Lives of Others, 2014) impresses with its fluid originality and ambition. Alternating chapters explore parallel narratives, one involving Miss Maud Gilby, an early-20th-century campaigner for women's education in colonial Bengal, the other devoted to modern-day Ritwik Ghosh, who escapes from Calcutta via a two-year scholarship to a British university and then stays on beyond his visa to live in social limbo in London. Horribly abused by his mother, Ritwik abandoned India after his parents' deaths but is now unmoored, with no religion or home, and is further marginalized by his homosexuality. Maud Gilby, meanwhile, turns out to be a minor character from fiction borrowed by Ritwik to feature in the story he's writing about India during a time of anti-British ferment, a tale of dislocated experience and exile mirroring Ritwik's life. In London he descends into the gritty worlds of undocumented labor and prostitution, scenarios intercut with oddly tender episodes spent taking care of his landlady, an 86-year-old with a past in India whom he tends with a concern that he could never show to his own mother. Ritwik's addiction to casual hookups draws him back repeatedly to the perilous yet thrilling sexual meat market around King's Cross Station, where he will find an inverted salvation through his relationship with a shady foreigner but will also discover the price of apartness. Consistently confounding expectations, Mukherjee's story of the gathering descent of a solitary soul is both poignant and unsentimental, the work of a notably sophisticated writer.

Kirkus Reviews