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Preeta Samarasan was born in Malaysia and moved to the United States during high school. Her first novel, Evening Is the Whole Day, was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. Her short fiction has won the Asian American Writers' Workshop Short Story Competition and been selected for a PEN/O. Henry Prize Collection. Her work has been published in A Public Space, Guernica, Copper Nickel, AGNI, and other journals. She lives with her family in the Limousin region of France.
Praise for Tale of the Dreamer's Son Politics, religion, culture and love collide on every page of Preeta Samarasan's new novel. At once furious and funny, majestic and intimate, Tale of the Dreamer's Son is an ode to the glorious and complex mess that is Malaysia. --Tash Aw Samarasan continues to be a wonder, a wryly vibrant, passionately astute chronicler of recent Malaysian history. --Peter Ho Davies Tale of the Dreamer's Son is a riveting, painful, funny read from the author of the powerful Evening Is the Whole Day. I'd been waiting for this book. Nobody writes like Preeta Samarasan. Through astute characterization, sheer drama, evocative settings, superb prose, and blended language, Samarasan draws me into all the deep questions that rattle the foundations of her beloved Malaysia. I love this book in many ways, for the storytelling, for the music in her writing, for the images, but also for how it reminds me of how issues in Malaysia continue to mirror ours in Nigeria and many other parts of the world. What a fantastic, fantastic book! -- Uwem Akpan, author of Say You're One of Them and New York, My Village Praise for Evening Is the Whole Day An impressive debut. The language bursts with energy, and Samarasan has a sure hand juggling so many distinct characters. -- Publishers Weekly A strong, spirit-spiked story about caste and unfairness, as furious, controlled, cool and urgent as Aravind Adiga's White Tiger and an introduction to a writer whose talent with narrative structure combines elegance and potency. -- ALI SMITH This is a claustrophobic novel of one family's emotional failure. Samarasan's inventive prose is stunning. -- The Guardian Extraordinarily incisive, Samarasan provocatively links the sorrows of one distraught family to Malaysia's bloody conflicts in a surpassingly wise and beautiful debut novel about the tragic consequences of the inability to love. -- Booklist Preeta Samarasan's passionate, striking book, stunned with light and heat, is full of the memory of enchantment and the enchantment of memory. Samarasan cultivates with brilliance the taut battle between the public and familial being, and the hidden and fragile inner self, trapped in a world of myth and mystery. -- SUSANNA MOORE, author of The Big Girls A wonderfully engaging novel, poignant yet comical, about the contradictions and hazards inherent in a modern, postcolonial world. -- M. G. VASSANJI, author of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall Rich, quirky, and colorful. Evening Is the Whole Day captures not just the sense of a family struggling to deal with its past, but the crazy uncertainty of a country coming to terms with itself. --TASH AW, author of The Harmony Silk Factory Samarasan captures beautifully the conflict both within the family and the country during the early years of Malaysia's independence. Vibrant, descriptive, and peppered with colourful Indian-Malaysian dialogue, this is an epic that's informative without being wordy, and engrossing but not frivolous. -- FRANCESCA SEGAL, The Observer You won't find India's heat and dust here; you will sense the moist warmth of South-East Asia. Samarasan represents the quiet emergence of new Malaysian writing in books such as Rani Manicka's The Rice Mother and Touching Earth, Tash Aw's The Harmony Silk Factory, and Tan Twan Eng's Booker-longlisted The Gift of Rain last year. These writers have significantly broadened our understanding of the region. -- SALIL TRIPATHI, The Independent A richly complex debut, weaving the troubled Malaysia of the 1980s with a dark, delicious Dickensian family drama. -- Waterstones Books Quarterly A magical, exuberant tragic-comic vision of post-colonial Malaysia reminiscent of Rushdie and Roy. In prose of acrobatic grace, Samarasan conjures a vibrant portrait, by turns intimate and sweeping, of characters and a country coming of age. The debut of a significant, and thrilling new talent. -- PETER HO DAVIES, author of The Welsh Girl An accomplished and magical debut. -- New Books Magazine Preeta Samarasan details the colourful and secretive lives of the Rajeskhrans, a wealthy Indian immigrant family. She keeps us guessing as the secrets that led to the family's relocation are slowly revealed. -- Image Magazine
