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A novel of multiple narratives, set in contemporary India, the new book from Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author Neel Mukherjee explores the urge to escape the life we are given for something better.

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Longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better?

Five people, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more.

Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

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"An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own." Rose Tremain

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Neel Mukherjee is the author of two previous novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers´ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel.

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