num_pages: 384
description: A Life Apart tells two stories. The first is of Ritwiks; a story of a young mans escape from a blighted childhood of squalor and abuse in Calcutta to the edge of what he considers to be a new world full of possibilities in England where he has a chance to start all over again. But his past especially the scarred all-consuming relationship with his mother is a minefield: will Ritwik find the salvation he is looking for? Could it arrive in the form of the second story that comprises the novel the one he is writing himself the story of an Englishwoman in the old world of Bengal on the eve of Indias first partition? Or could it be in the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne Cameron fragile and damaged who gives shelter to Ritwik in London in exchange of the care that she needs? And then one night in the badlands of Kings Cross Ritwik meets the suave unfathomable Zafar bin Hashm. As present and past of several lives collide Ritwiks own goes into free fall. Set in India during the 1970s and 80s in England in the 90s and in Raj Bengal in the 1900s this award-winning first novel from one of Indias most acclaimed new writers is about dislocation and alienation outsiders and losers the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories and the consolations of storytelling. Unsentimental yet full of compassion and written with unrelenting honesty this scalding debut marks a new turning point in writing from and of the Subcontinent.
language: English
title: A Life Apart
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company