My Beloved Life

This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling. A father, a daughter, a crime, a country being born, a migration, another country, a plague. “We are in touch with a great astonishing mystery when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness. Everything else is ordinary,” Kumar writes. His novel offers magnificent witness, and is not ordinary but extraordinary. – Salman Rushdie
Always deeply human, the heart is everywhere in these pages … Kumar’s beautiful, truthful fiction rings with gratitude and anticipated grief. – James Wood, The New Yorker
Shows what good fiction can achieve … A highly sophisticated, self-aware novel from a writer operating at the peak of his powers – The Federal (India)
Alienation and guilt, the emotional markers of migration, loom large in Kumar’s ambitious and deceptive novel * The New York Times *
A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted and revised. – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
Amitava Kumar has the precious ability to write across borders and cultures. – Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland
A majestic Indian family saga in successive bildungsroman narratives of a father and daughter … Kumar excels at blending mysticism and a refined cosmopolitan perspective. – Publishers Weekly, starred review
An immersive, moving portrait … both of India over 85 years and of the whipsawing experience of being an Indian citizen of the larger world … that steadily gathers intensity, vividness, and surprise. – Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Both ambitious in its scope and deeply personal … a near-irresistible story of how no life is without consequence * Bookmunch *

Amitava Kumar was born in Ara, India, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna. He is the author of the novel Immigrant, Montana, as well as several other books of non-fiction and fiction. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York and teaches at Vassar College.

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