The Lives of Others

An epic saga telling the story of a Bengali family in Calcutta – exploring a family that is decaying as the society around it fractures, and one young man who tries to reimagine his place in the world.

Masterful … His fierce intelligence and sophisticated storytelling combine to produce an unforgettable portrait of one family riven by the forces of history and their own desires.

Rich and engrossing … Consistently vivid and well realised, it confidently covers a great deal of varied social terrain. … Unfailingly interesting

Very ambitious and very successful. … One of Mukherjee's great gifts is precisely his capacity to imagine the lives of others. … Neel Mukherjee terrifies and delights us simultaneously

Deeply affecting and ambitious ... In startling imagery that sears itself into the mind, The Lives of Others excellently exposes the gulf between rich and poor, young and old, tradition and modernity, us and them, showing how acts of empathy are urgently needed to bridge the divides.

Neel Mukherjee has written an outstanding novel: compelling, compassionate and complex, vivid, musical and fierce.

Full of acute, often uncomfortable and angry, observations, The Lives of Others is a picture of a family in all its disunity, and beyond it a city and country, on the brink of disaster.

A Seth-ian narrative feast with dishes to spare ... a graphic reminder that the bourgeois Indian culture western readers so readily idealize is sustained at terrible human cost

Expansive and often brilliant… Mukherjee spares the reader nothing…yet his command of storytelling is so astounding, he draws the reader into places they would prefer not to look

The writing is unfailingly beautiful … Resembles a tone poem in its dazzling orchestration of the crescendo of domestic racket. His eye is as acute as his ear: the physicality of people and objects is delineated with a hyper-aesthetic vividness ….

Neel Mukherjee has given us a picture of India that cuts through history, social classes and regions but centers on a nouveau pauvre family. Every scene is rendered with a Tolstoyan clarity and compassion.

A devastating portrayal of a decadent society and the inevitably violent uprising against it, in the tradition of such politically charged Indian literature as the work of Prem Chand, Manto and Mulk Raj Anand. It is ferocious, unsparing and brutally honest.

Powerful… Mukherjee’s depiction of the tangled system…that develops when so many members of a family live under one roof is superb… In clear yet lyrical prose, Mukherjee carefully explores not just what it means to be part of a family, but what it means to be part of an unequal society… It’s impossible not to be utterly engaged by this intelligent and moving epic

Compelling, affecting, intelligent and surprising… Bold and striking… Worked out with precision and gracefulness… Ambitious and eloquent, and in forgoing exoticism captures genuine humanity

The Lives of Others is searing, savage and deeply moving: an unforgettably vivid picture of a time of turmoil.

The writing’s assured, considered and lucid, the author’s observations of character wry and acute. He has a real talent for revealing people’s true intentions and why they act the way they do

Mukherjee creates a believable world where the jealousies and rivalries of one family are representative of the country

A powerful generational story of the chasm between the haves and have-nots

Neel Mukherjee is the author of two previous novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 
 
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 
 
Winner of the Encore Award 
 
Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 
 
Longlisted for the IMPAC Prize 
 
 
Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is a note. 
 
At home, his family slowly begins to unravel. Poisonous rivalries grow, the once-thriving family business implodes and destructive secrets are unearthed. And all around them the sands are shifting as society fractures, for this is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change. 
 
‘Deeply moving’ Amitav Ghosh 
 
‘Terrifies and delights’ A S Byatt, Guardian 
 
‘Unforgettable’ Daily Telegraph

Neel Mukherjee

An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own.

Neel Mukherjee's breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a furious, unsparing, clear-eyed study of how a society's gross inequities of money and power demean and deform the human condition. The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time.

Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you've turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.

A State of Freedom is an extraordinary achievement. Subtle and multi-layered, it's a study of the brutality of social divisions, written with tremendous tenderness; a work that insists on the dignity of figures obliged to lead undignified lives. A powerful, troubling novel. The moment I finished it, I began it again.

A State of Freedom is a novel like no other -- its prose is so rich, unequivocally precise and graceful that it allows Mukherjee to illustrate the most horrific of experiences with stunning compassion. A State of Freedom is more than a novel—it is an immersive experience. He writes like a painter, his language is his palette, one reminiscent of the late Howard Hodgkin's. Mukherjee brings to life the variation of India’s cities and towns in a dense multi-layered world where modern life, by accident or intention, tears at traditions that are centuries old. Throughout we are reminded of how little power many have over their lives and of emotional and financial economies so fragile that something as small as a single egg can carry great weight.

This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity—a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece!

an extraordinary account of the tenacious will to survive… He seeds his tales with images of unexpected beauty… Freedom here is relative, complicated, fissured and often won at another’s expense

Neel Mukherjee shows himself to be one of those contemporary authors who invites readers to make connections between seemingly disparate story strands… Combined with Mukherjee’s rich realisation of the novel’s individual elements, this indeterminacy makes A State of Freedom a powerful, memorable treatment of a theme too often reduced to uninvolving didacticism

The beauty of Mukherjee’s prose sucks the reader into an alternative world, where misery, deprivation and the struggle to exist another day are normal

Mukherjee… homes in on the restless, the disinherited, the socially trapped… Mercilessly observant, he does not spare the reader but leavens scenes of savagery, squalor and despair with moments of rainbow vividness, all the more striking for the muddy, cacophonous backdrop from which they are brought forth… In a significant and porous work, Mukherjee gives congruence and visibility to these fractured, hidden lives

He does what good novelists should, which is to hold up a mirror to society and remind people that what passes for normal is often barbaric. His quiet observation is effective – and damning

Set in contemporary India, technically daring, deeply compassionate, it’s a powerful, pertinent novel about migration and social injustice

Each story is intimate and universal, concrete and elusive… A State of Freedom is ambitious, and it succeeds on all levels

Narrated with the precise realism that we have come to expect of Neel Mukherjee’s novels… A State of Freedom resonates with intricate and disturbing echoes… Mukherjee has created an India that is always graspable and always elusive

In Mukherjee’s hands familiar fare is elevated by his empathy for the poor and the journalistic efforts he undertakes to understand them… his best work yet… This bleak and entirely justified vision of modern India is what binds together Mukherjee’s stories and indeed his oeuvre

A compelling read set in contemporary India that explores the attempts of five characters, each in different circumstances, to exchange the life they are leading for something better

A brilliant novel, deeply compassionate and painterly, reminding me of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings. Mukherjee brings to life the colours and sounds of a place where modern life is constantly crashing against tradition

Mukherjee’s characters are so well drawn and their plights so affecting that we stop quibbling over how to categorise the book and simply lose ourselves in masterful storytelling… Random bouts of cruelty… unfold in electrifying prose

A thing of wonder… does what a great novel should do… one of the most wonderful novels I’ve read for ages and ages… such wonderful high calibre writing’

Brilliant… I couldn’t put it down…everything about it rang true… so gripping, so thrilling

A splendidly rich and affirmative novel

An especially searing account of state oppression and Communist terror… everything is held together by Mukherjee’s wonderfully inventive prose style

An exceptional portrait of modern India – and one of the best novels this year

Mukherjee confronts us with the deranged performances of both master and slave… A State of Freedom’s artfully handled piecing together of story fragments is held in tension by a counterforce of textual disintegration

This novel paints a vivid picture of modern India, its beauty and its benightedness, examining the relationship between identity and migration. Mukherjee is pitch-perfect in his descriptions of Indian life and unsparing in chronicling the poverty, deprivation and superstition that blights the nation. The book’s themes are important and the writing powerful, in places shocking

Harsh and vibrant… Mukherjee’s deep knowledge of India and the West, allied to his never-failing curiosity about the ties that both bind us and separate us, makes him an outstanding chronicler of Bengali life, seen from within and without… In an age when so many fiction writers flimflam around in a cloud of unknowing, Mukherjee has an eagle’s eye for the truth

It’s a brave and frequently devastating novel whose themes of displacement and dehumanisation are all too timely

The last book that made my heart race? That’d be Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom: completely propulsive and horrifying and astonishing

A powerful novel about alienation and the illusion of freedom.

Stories of displacement, alienation and inequality add up to dynamic, life-affirming symphony – albeit one punctuated with discordant and unsettling notes.

Mukherjee confronts head-on the appalling deprivation and the caste stigma that bedevil so many lives, and the result is as powerful as it is disturbing.

Mesmerising complexity and the sharpness mixed with compassion and empathy. All the stories are beautifully written… Long after I finished it I realized the characters were still with me, vivid, compelling, haunting

Longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 
 
What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? 
 
Five people, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more. 
 
Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

Neel Mukherjee

Praise for A State of Freedom

An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own.

Neel Mukherjee's breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a ...

Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentiment ...

An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own.

Neel Mukherjee's breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a ...

Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentiment ...

An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own.

Neel Mukherjee's breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a ...

Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentiment ...

Books by Neel Mukherjee

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