An Obedient Father

20 May 2014

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Description

“A powerful debut novel that establishes Sharma as a supreme storyteller.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in New Delhi, lives with his widowed daughter and his little granddaughter. Bumbling, sad, ironic, Ram is also a man corroded by a terrible secret. Taking the reader down into a world of feuding families and politics, An Obedient Father is a work of rare sensibilities that presents a character as formulated, funny, and morally ambiguous as any of Dostoevsky’s antiheroes.

Reviews

"An uncompromising novel, a portrait of a country ravaged by vendetta and graft." — Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books

"Weaves the national into the personal without a trace of the didactic. What is more astonishing is his success in joining the amiably picaresque aspects of the corruption…with the ghastly evil of its underside." — Richard Eder, New York Times

"A moving, persuasive tragicomedy." — Entertainment Weekly

"Stunning work." — The Nation

"Extraordinary." — Salon

Awards

Winner — Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, 2001

Winner — PEN/Hemingway Award, 2001

Paperback

9780393337815

140 x 211 mm • 288 pages

£11.99

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