My Beloved Life

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

Always deeply human, the heart is everywhere in these pages . . . Kumar's beautiful, truthful fiction rings with gratitude and anticipated grief.James Wood, The New Yorker

Shows what good fiction can achieve . . . A highly sophisticated, self-aware novel from a writer operating at the peak of his powersThe Federal (India)

A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted and revised.Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies