Choice
-
- £4.99
Publisher Description
'A brilliant, bleak moral maze of a novel' Guardian
'Dazzling... by turns comic, lyrical and heartbreaking' Monica Ali
'Profound and beautiful' Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting
'A vital, haunting, devastating read' Sarah Waters
A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift.
These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee's new novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.
Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them.
'A magnificent achievement' Namwali Serpell
'A superb writer... his greatest work yet' Michelle de Kretser
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mukherjee (The Lives of Others) offers a diffuse novel in three parts, each tangentially linked by their protagonists' negotiation of moral quandaries. The first section portrays London book editor Ayush as his depression pushes him toward a mental breakdown. He shows his five-year-old twins a video of pigs being slaughtered in lieu of a bedtime story, having gotten the idea they should know where meat comes from. The second section comprises a story by one of Ayush's authors, about a bored academic named Emily, whose London ride share driver gets in an accident. The details are fuzzy to Emily, but she's concerned she was involved in a hit-and-run. She tracks down the driver, but after learning he's an Eritrean refugee, she has second thoughts about reporting the incident. The third section, set in rural India, is based on an anecdote Anush hears at a party about the gift of a cow to a poor family, which inadvertently sets into motion a series of events that leaves the family in ruin. Rote ruminations about the shortcomings of contemporary publishing and academia bog things down, and while Mukherjee exhaustively explores the gray areas inhabited by his characters, the three narratives don't quite hang together. This doesn't reach the heights of the author's previous work.
