Family Life: A Novel

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review and New York Magazine

"Gorgeously tender at its core beautiful, heartstopping Family Life really blazes." Sonali Deraniyagala, New York Times Book Review

Known for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.

Growing up in Delhi in 1978, eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju play cricket on the streets, eagerly waiting for the day they can join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more until tragedy strikes. Young Ajay prays to a God he envisions as Superman, searching for direction amid the ruins of his family's new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.