Author: Manju Kapur
Publisher: Random House India
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 337
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8184000006
Description
In Manju Kapur’s emblematic new novel, the seemingly tranquil world of a joint family is coming apart. Banwari Lal, patriarch of a cloth business in the middle class New Delhi neighbourhood of Karol Bagh, is a believer in the old ways. Men work out of the home, women within. Men carry forward the family line, women enable their mission. His two sons unquestioningly follow their father in business and in life, but their wives will not. Neither will his grand-daughter, who makes choice sonsidered unavailable to the women of the family.
With unswerving attention, Kapur follows the members of this traditional family into the uneasy world they come to inhabit. From the frenetic sensory overload of modern urban India, she constructs a story as intricate, quiet and dazzling as the fabric produced by the family. Told in a sustained colloquial voice, Home is startling in its sweep and unerringly accurate in the bleakness and hope it presents.
REVIEWS
A fast-moving story which makes an ordinary middle class family’s life in Delhi extraordinary - quite an achievement.
-Mark Tully
Manju Kapur is one of the most perceptive chroniclers of that microcosm of the nation state: the joint family. The narrative voice is deceptively soft, for Kapur lays it all bare-conflicting loyalties, intrigues, triumphs, and tragedies.
-Kiran Nagarkar
Few writers have explored the complex terrain of the Indian family with as much insight and affection as Maju Kapur.
She describes the small rebellions and intense power struggles with a knowledge of the human heart that is at once compelling and terrifying.
-Nilanjana Roy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
MANJU KAPUR lives in New Delhi, where she is a teacher of English literature at Miranda House, Delhi University. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia Section), and her second novel, a Married Woman, was a bestseller in both India and the UK. She is married to Gun Nidhi Dalmia.