A Life Apart - Tapa dura

Sharp, disturbing and precisely written .--A.S. Byatt, TLS.
< br/> Mukherjee writes fearless prose, cut with wry humour and extraordinary compassion .--Rose Tremain, Sunday Telegraph.
< br/> The writing ... has a sculptured clarity. Assured and fearless. ... This is subtle, precise writing that penetrates character and motive with astringent humour. --The Times.
< br/> There are a lot of subtle cultural ironies in Neel Mukherjee s debut novel, which is what makes the book such a delight. ... A Life Apart is an elegant and accomplished debut, a novel of many shades. It blends the poignancy of a coming-of-age story with the rawer excitements of an urban thriller laced with sex and violence. --Sunday Telegraph.
< br/> Mukherjee deftly interweaves the worlds of the arms trade, sex workers, fruit pickers and the Daily Mail, while also casting a light on the economic policies of the Raj, communal violence and the fragility of relationships conducted under the glare of history. But he never loses sight of his characters and their emotional upheaval. The growing tension is expertly handled; the ending unsurprising yet completely devastating. --The Guardian.
< br/> Rich and nuanced ... Mukherjee is excellent on what motivates people to act the way they do. --The Daily Telegraph.
< br/> Impressive. ... Mukherjee writes wryly and wonderfully. ... Not since Alan Hollinghurst s The Swimming Pool Library have I been as engaged by an imagining of gay twilight. ... Deeply engaging and brilliantly observed. --The Independent.
< br/> Mukherjee summons place and character brilliantly and unflinchingly in pages redolent with detail. His metaphysical vision, of course, is just as acute. --TIME Magazine.
< br/> Ambitious and subtly written. --The Sunday Times.
< br/> Beautifully written and intelligently perceptive, A Life Apart is a novel about difference and expectation and the ironies that punctuate the middle ground between them. ... A wonderfully assured and fresh debut . --Literary Review.

The writing ... has a sculptured clarity. Assured and fearless. ... This is subtle, precise writing that penetrates character and motive with astringent humour. --Helen Dunmore, The Times

Mukherjee writes wryly and wonderfully ... Deeply engaging and brilliantly observed. --Mark Turner, Independent

Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. But to do so, he must not only relive his entire past but also try and understand it. Moreover, he must make sense of his relationship with his mother - scarred, abusive and all-consuming. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Instead he moves to London, where he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of illegal immigrants. However, the story that Ritwik writes to stave off his utter and complete loneliness - a Miss Gilby who teaches English, music and Western manners to the wife of educated zamindar - begins to find ghostly echoes in his life with his aged landlady, Anne Cameron. And then, one night, in the badlands of King's Cross, Ritwik runs into Zafar bin Hashm, suave, impossibly rich, unfathomable, possible arms dealer. What does the drive to redemption hold for lost Ritwik? Set in 1970s and 80s India, 90s England and in the first decade of twentieth-century Bengal, "A Life Apart" is a scalding novel about dislocations and alienations, about the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories and about the consolations of storytelling. Above all, it is about the impossibilities of love.