The Lives of Others

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Money corrupts and wealth corrupts absolutely in Mukherjee's (A Life Apart) second novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize-a devastatingly detailed account of a family's downfall amid the political turmoil and social unrest of India in the late 1960s and early '70s. In 1967, five generations of the Ghosh family occupy the four floors of their Calcutta home, from the top floor-where Prafullanath, the patriarch, suffers the indignities of old age; his wife tyrannizes her daughter-in-law; and his eldest son Adinath, responsible for running the overextended family paper business, resides with wife and children-down to street level, where the widow and two children of Prafullanath's youngest son share one small room. Adinath's two brothers and their families, along with their unmarriageable sister, complete the household, while servant Madan supplies unrequited compassion. Supratnik (Adinath's son) escapes to the countryside to sow Maoist rebellion as labor strife, jealousy, vice, and betrayal poisons relationships at home. Mukherjee reveals the unraveling social fabric through interwoven points of view. Powerful evocations of poverty and oppression begin in the prologue, recounting a debt-driven murder-suicide, and do not stop until the last excruciating scenes of police torture. This challenging epic has the scope of a political novel and the humanity of a family saga without sentimentality. Descriptions of a rooftop garden, the wonders of mathematics, and the charm of a secret flirtation offer brief respites from the economic and social injustices of post-independence India. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Mukherjee's West Bengal upstairs/downstairs epic can be raw but honest as he delves unflinchingly into the struggles of a family caught up in the social, economic, and political turmoil of 1960s India. The once solidly middle-class Ghoshes occupy all four floors of their Calcutta home. The top floor belongs to the highest-ranking members, parents Prafullanath and Charubala. Below, each floor is assigned to family members in descending order of rank, from eldest son Adinath and wife Sandhya all the way down to a storage room on the ground floor where Purba, widow of the Ghoshes' youngest son, lives with her two children, one of whom is a math savant, possibly autistic. The family's paper and publishing businesses are failing, and their once shiny and respectable patina is starting to corrode around the edges. Witness eldest grandson Supratik, who goes off to college and becomes a Marxist, determined to champion the rights of the poor and downtrodden. Mukherjee's scope is vast yet so intimately personal that it's easy imagine him donning different costumes for the characters as he composes their stories; perhaps literally walking in their shoes. How he accomplished such a wonderful feat is unknown. What is known is that this novel stands as a literary boon. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, its American edition was rushed into print.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The evolution of an upper-class Bengali family in the late 1960s reflects India's political turbulence in this confidently expansive second novel from Mukherjee (A Life Apart, 2010), which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.Like a rolling stone, Mukherjee's nonostentatious epic accrues its weight and mass gradually; it's a three-generational family saga that embraces tensions both micro- and macro-cosmic. The majestic Ghosh family mansion in Calcutta reflects the nation's entrenched economic hierarchy, with the wealthy patriarch, Prafullanath, and his wife, Charubala, on the top floor and the servant classes and spurned family members at the bottom. Prafullanath, once an entrepreneurial genius who built a fortune in the paper-making industry, is now a broken reed, his health ruined, his empire failing after bad investments. On the middle floors of the house live the second and third Ghosh generations, three married sons with their children and a sour spinster daughter, and below them, the disgraced widow of a bad-seed fourth son. The family's history is intricately, nonchronologically narrated in brief episodes that point up the power struggles, petty jealousies, cruelties and sexual attractions among the individual members. Mingled with these episodes are extracts from a diary written by Prafullanath's eldest grandson, Supratik, who has absconded to become a Communist Naxalite guerrilla among the rural poor. Supratik's chapters offer glimpses of the extremes of poverty and corruption in Bengal and of its essential beauties toothe green velvet of the rice paddies, the monsoon rains. But political violence emerges in Supratik's story, matched by union troubles at the Ghosh paper mills. After Supratik's eventual return to the Calcutta household, its unraveling gains pace. Mukherjee closes with two epilogues that offer contrasting views of the consequences. This is an immensely accomplished, steady-handed achievement, Victorian in its solidity, quietly enthralling in its insightful observation of the ties that bind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.