Family Life - Rilegato

Akhil Sharma

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0571314260 ISBN 13: 9780571314263

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2014

Riassunto

WINNER OF THE FOLIO PRIZE 2015

Heart-wrenching and darkly comic, this acclaimed second novel from the author of An Obedient Father is the beautifully told story of a boy torn between duty and survival.

For eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju, family life in Delhi in the late 1970s follows a comfortable, predictable routine: bathing on the roof, queuing for milk, playing day-long games of cricket in the street. Everything changes when their father finds a job in America - a land of carpets and elevators, swimsuits and hot water - and the Mishras, envy of their neighbourhood back home, become the latest unknowns in the vast expanse of New York.

Life in America is extraordinary, and as snows and summers come and go the brothers adjust to their exciting new world of prosperity, girls and 24-hour TV. But then comes the hot, sultry day when everything falls apart: tragedy turns the Mishras' American dream into a living nightmare and young Ajay finds himself lost and virtually orphaned in a land that is not his own.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

In his outstanding follow up to An Obedient Father, Akhil Sharma writes the book on love, duty, family and what it means to become American. Every page is alive and surprising. Proof of his huge, unique talent. (David Sedaris)

Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core. (Sonali Deraniyagala New York Times Book Review)

Sharma's plain style, its gaps and fissures and mighty sense of lack, is both proof of the inability of words to render grief and a demonstration that they can do exactly that. Family Life breaks all those rules to do with writing fiction: Sharma's simple words tell in order that they might show. (Kirsty Gunn Guardian)

A huge achievement. (Fiammetta Rocco The Economist)

To use expressions like 'extraordinarily moving' or 'brilliantly observed' to describe this book is to do it a disservice, because here is a novel that seems to call for its own language of praise. Maybe it's enough to say that Akhil Sharma's Family Life is an immigrant story like no other: funny and dark, unrelenting and, above all, true - in the pure way that only the rarest novel can achieve. (Nell Freudenberger)

[A] delicate and often moving work of palliative poetics. (Sukhdev Sandhu The Observer)

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. Akhil Sharma's place among the best literary novelists of his generation is likewise secure. (Gary Shteyngart)

[A] hard-earned and impressive result. (Randy Boyagoda Financial Times)

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] totally candid and unpretentious voice. (Sunday Times)

Descrizione del libro:

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.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571314260
• ISBN 13: 9780571314263
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 224