Family Life A Novel [Hardcover]

Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender.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.Bracingly vivid& Has the ring of all devastatingly good writing: truth.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.An immigrant story like no other: funny and dark, unrelenting and above all, true.A loving portrait, both painful and honest.[F]ine and memorable.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.A heartbreaking novel-from-life& [Sharma] takes after Hemingway, as each word of his brilliant novel feels deliberate, and each line is quietly moving.Sharma spent 13 years writing this slim novel, and the effort shows in each lucid sentence and heartbreaking detail.An unsentimental, powerful portrait of immigrant life from an author who has been compared to Dostoyevsky.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.Dark humor twines through Sharmas unforgettable story of survival and its costs.I lost all track of time while I was reading it, and felt by the end that Id 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.With his subtly drawn point of viewrecreating the childs perceptions but with the controlling sensibility of an adult intelligenceSharma gives us a fully imaginl3�