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A Novel
by Amitava Kumar
An absorbing, exceptionally moving novel that traces the arc of a man's life, an ordinary life made exceptional by the fact that he has loved and has been loved in turn.
Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. In 1935 in a village near George Orwell's birthplace, Jadu's mother, while pregnant with him, nearly dies from a cobra bite. When we see Jadu again, he is in college, meeting the Sherpa who first summited Everest and wondering what it means to be modern. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, and as changes big and small sweep across India, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States—whose own story recasts the past in a new light. Piercing, fleet-footed, and undeniably resonant, here is a novel from a singularly gifted writer about how we tell stories and write history, how individuals play a counterpoint to big movements, how no single life is without consequence.
"An immersive, moving portrait that steadily gathers intensity, vividness, and surprise." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Kumar unfurls a majestic Indian family saga in successive bildungsroman narratives of a father and daughter...Kumar excels at blending mysticism and a refined cosmopolitan perspective...Readers will find much to savor." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"My Beloved Life is storytelling at its best...A moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history...Imagine finding yourself in the company of a stranger. A simple hello organically morphs into hours of conversation, full of resonating and enlightening stories. This is the feeling one gets while reading My Beloved Life." —BookPage (starred review)
"This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling. A father, a daughter, a crime, a country being born, a migration, another country, a plague. 'We are in touch with a great astonishing mystery when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness. Everything else is ordinary,' Kumar writes. His novel offers magnificent witness, and is not ordinary but extraordinary." —Salman Rushdie
"What makes a life? My Beloved Life addresses this most fundamental of questions with all of Amitava Kumar's trademark wisdom and wit. A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted, and revised." —Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
This information about My Beloved Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and four novels. Kumar's novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and President Obama's list of favorite books of 2018. His novel A Time Outside This Time was described by The New Yorker as "a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist." Kumar's nonfiction books include The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal; Every Day I Write the Book; A Matter of Rats; Lunch With a Bigot; A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb; and, Husband of a Fanatic. Kumar's work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Harper's, Guernica, The Nation and several other publications. Kumar has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Lannan Foundation. He is currently a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.
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