Family Life - Couverture souple

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) --Sunday Times

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, with his skull and bones honesty, leaves the reader, finally and surprisingly, moved. (Kiran Desai) --Kiran Desai

Worth the wait: a wonderful novel by an excellent writer. (Mohsin Hamid) --Mohsin Hamid

Akhil Sharma was born in Delhi in India and emigrated to the USA in 1979. His stories have been published in the New Yorker and in Atlantic Monthly, and have been included in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Collections. His first novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. He was named one of Granta's 'Best of Young American Novelists' in 2007.