My Beloved Life

Amitava Kumar

$22.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Picador
10 June 2025

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Fiction: special features; Migration, immigration & emigration

This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling.' - Salman Rushdie

'Kumar's late father's life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story . . . Always deeply human; the heart is everywhere in these pages . . . beautiful, truthful fiction.' - James Wood, The New Yorker

A novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi.

Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. 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 perspective sheds its own light on his story.

All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India - from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID - and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu's lives.

Amitava Kumar's remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence.

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

By: Amitava Kumar
Imprint: Picador
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 131mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 250g
ISBN: 9781035013715
ISBN 10: 1035013711
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 10 June 2025
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Author Website: http://www.amitavakumar.com/

Amitava Kumar was born in Ara, India, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna. He is the author of the novel Immigrant, Montana, as well as several other books of non-fiction and fiction. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York and teaches at Vassar College.

Reviews for 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 Amitava Kumar has the precious ability to write across borders and cultures. -- Joseph O'Neill, author of <i>Netherland</i>