Obedient Father, An

Obedient Father, An

by Akhil Sharma (Author)

Synopsis

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Delhi school system, lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his eight-year-old granddaughter. Bumbling, ironical, sad, Ram is also a man tortured by a terrible guilty secret. When Rajiv Gandhi, the soon-to-be Prime Minister, is murdered, the country is plunged into confusion and Ram, as his department's resident bribe-collector, is trapped in a series of escalating, potentially deadly political betrayals. While he tries to protect himself and his family, his daughter reveals a crime that he had hoped would be buried forever. An Obedient Father takes the reader to an India that is both far away and real - into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, and morally ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky's anti-heroes. This is a subtly rendered tragicomedy of contemporary India by an enormously gifted young writer.

$12.15

Quantity

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Edition: New e.
Publisher: Faber
Published: 03 Sep 2001

ISBN 10: 0571210384
ISBN 13: 9780571210381

Media Reviews
'Another bright young star in the firmament of Indian writing.' The New York Times
Author Bio
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. His second novel, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2016. Sharma is currently a Fellow at The New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.