‘There are a lot of subtle cultural ironies in Neel Mukherjee’s debut novel, which is what makes the book such a delight. … A Life Apart is an elegant and accomplished debut, a novel of many shades. It blends the poignancy of a coming-of-age story with the rawer excitements of an urban thriller laced with sex and violence.’ DAVID ROBSON, The Sunday Telegraph.

‘Mukherjee deftly interweaves the worlds of the arms trade, sex workers, fruit pickers and the Daily Mail, while also casting a light on the economic policies of the Raj, communal violence and the fragility of relationships conducted under the glare of history. But he never loses sight of his characters and their emotional upheaval. The growing tension is expertly handled; the ending unsurprising yet completely devastating.’ KAMILA SHAMSIE, The Guardian.

‘Rich and nuanced … Mukherjee is excellent on what motivates people to act the way they do.’ The Daily Telegraph.

‘Impressive. … Mukherjee writes wryly and wonderfully. … Not since Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library have I been as engaged by an imagining of gay twilight. … Deeply engaging and brilliantly observed.’ MARK TURNER, The Independent.

‘Mukherjee summons place and character brilliantly and unflinchingly in pages redolent with detail. His metaphysical vision, of course, is just as acute.’ TIME Magazine.

‘Ambitious and subtly written.’ The Sunday Times.

‘Beautifully written and intelligently perceptive, A Life Apart is a novel about difference and expectation and the ironies that punctuate the middle ground between them. … A wonderfully assured and fresh debut’. ROSALIND PORTER, Literary Review.

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‘A brilliant first novel. Mukherjee has a big heart and an unflinching gaze and the result is shockingly good.’ ROSE TREMAIN.

‘Incisive and poetic, sensual and intelligent, a book with great breadth, heart and courage.’ ALI SMITH.

‘One of the most intense and disturbing works of fiction I’ve read in many years.’ PANKAJ MISHRA.

A top pick for 2010, Open Book, Radio 4.

Picked by The Independent’s Talent 2010 issue.

A Life Apart tells two stories. The first is of Ritwik’s; a story of a young man’s escape from a blighted childhood of squalor and abuse in Calcutta to the edge of what he considers to be a new world, full of possibilities, in England, where he has a chance to start all over again. But his past, especially the scarred, all-consuming relationship with his mother, is a minefield: will Ritwik find the salvation he is looking for?

Could it arrive in the form of the second story that comprises the novel, the one he is writing himself, the story of an Englishwoman in the old world of Bengal on the eve of India’s first partition? Or could it be in the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne Cameron, fragile and damaged, who gives shelter to Ritwik in London in exchange of the care that she needs? And then one night, in the badlands of King’s Cross, Ritwik meets the suave, unfathomable Zafar bin Hashm. As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall.

Set in India during the 1970s and ’80s, in England in the ’90s and in Raj Bengal in the 1900s, this award-winning first novel from one of India’s most acclaimed new writers is about dislocation and alienation, outsiders and losers, the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories, and the consolations of storytelling. Unsentimental yet full of compassion, and written with unrelenting honesty, this scalding debut marks a new turning point in writing from and of the Subcontinent.

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‘ … well written … excellent … an engaging novel. Mukherjee’s achievement is to have written an eminently readable immigrant novel. In the process, he is able to bring to light the fickleness and flimsiness of the idea of love and happiness in terms of a young man’s search for home. … A naturally good writer.’ Tehelka.

‘A writer of skill, imagination and ambition. Like a master weaver, Neel Mukherjee spins a tale of interweaving warp and weft, moving backward and forward in time and place, … easily shifting narrative as it ties up the threads of different tales, tossing in history, myth and collective memory … and drawing parallels within each narrative.’ Mint.

‘There is a bitterness — almost savage in its quality — about Neel Mukherjee’s debut novel that wrenches the reader out of his comfort zone. The only way to engage with this book would have to be from the gut-level.’ The Telegraph.

‘Brilliant and disturbing … Instead of the cloying nostalgia that fills so much diasporic fiction, we have a hard, painful hatred, a desire to burn the past into the bitter ashes of the cremation-ground. … Intensely imagined, densely populated … the narrative is taut with possibility. … Past Continuous makes us uncomfortable, unsettles our confidence in persons and places, but it also excites us with the tension and hope of literary as well as existential risk-taking.’ Biblio. (To read this exceptional essay by Supriya Chaudhuri, click here.)

‘Not very often do we come across a novel so intense, thoughtful and one that runs on so many levels simultaneously. … Past Continuous is an engaging and powerful work of art.’ The Tribune.

‘Cleverly crafted and impeccably written, the book refuses to be put down till the end.’ Marie Claire.

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The past is a cruel country; it never renounces its claim on you. Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds a chance to start his life all over again when he arrives in England to study. But to do that, he must not only relive his entire past but also try and understand it, naming things, making connections, unravelling the thread of a narrative he can only now bring himself to read. Above all, he must make sense of his relationship with his mother – scarred, abusive and all-consuming.

But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for and as he loses himself in London and takes up residence with the old Anne Cameron he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of aliens. Meanwhile, the story that Ritwik writes to stave off his utter and complete loneliness – a Miss Gilby who teaches English, music and Western manners to Bimala, wife of educated zamindar, Nikhilesh – begins to find ghostly echoes in his life with Anne Cameron.

Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the two stories across time, the stories of Miss Gilby in Raj India at a critical time in its domestic politics, and of Anne Cameron, whose South London garden starts being visited inexplicably by rare tropical birds, start converging. Which one is Ritwik making up?

And then, one night, in the badlands of King’s Cross, Ritwik runs into Zafar bin Hashm, suave, impossibly rich, unfathomable, possible arms dealer. What does the drive to redemption hold for lost Ritwik?

Set in 1970s and 80s India, 90s England and in the first decade of twentieth-century Bengal, on the eve of Lord Curzon’s infamous Bengal Partition of 1905, Past Continuous is a scalding book about dislocations and alienations, about outsiders and losers, about the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories and about the consolations of storytelling. It is also a book about the impossibilities of love.

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