a fascinating journey into the past filled with historical detail ... Highly recommended

Breathes the life and times of the late 1930's into you

A story of adventure enthralling in its scope and inventiveness, by turns comic and horrific, zestful and elegaic, involving a reclusive order of monks whose church is slowly sliding into the sea; Renaissance Rome with its sexual license and political rivalries; war and atrocity in the Central Italian States; and a remote tribe in the West African rain forest. Running through this variegated fable is the search for the rhinoceros. The exuberance, the sheer proliferation of incident and scene, are disciplined and controlled by unerring narrative pace and cunning

A truly fabulous piece of new British fiction

Neel Mukherjee has written an outstanding novel: compelling, compassionate and complex, vivid, musical and fierce.

Full of acute, often uncomfortable and angry, observations, The Lives of Others is a picture of a family in all its disunity, and beyond it a city and country, on the brink of disaster.

A Seth-ian narrative feast with dishes to spare ... a graphic reminder that the bourgeois Indian culture western readers so readily idealize is sustained at terrible human cost

Expansive and often brilliant… Mukherjee spares the reader nothing…yet his command of storytelling is so astounding, he draws the reader into places they would prefer not to look

The writing is unfailingly beautiful … Resembles a tone poem in its dazzling orchestration of the crescendo of domestic racket. His eye is as acute as his ear: the physicality of people and objects is delineated with a hyper-aesthetic vividness ….

Neel Mukherjee has given us a picture of India that cuts through history, social classes and regions but centers on a nouveau pauvre family. Every scene is rendered with a Tolstoyan clarity and compassion.

A devastating portrayal of a decadent society and the inevitably violent uprising against it, in the tradition of such politically charged Indian literature as the work of Prem Chand, Manto and Mulk Raj Anand. It is ferocious, unsparing and brutally honest.

Brilliant

Powerful… Mukherjee’s depiction of the tangled system…that develops when so many members of a family live under one roof is superb… In clear yet lyrical prose, Mukherjee carefully explores not just what it means to be part of a family, but what it means to be part of an unequal society… It’s impossible not to be utterly engaged by this intelligent and moving epic

Compelling, affecting, intelligent and surprising… Bold and striking… Worked out with precision and gracefulness… Ambitious and eloquent, and in forgoing exoticism captures genuine humanity

The Lives of Others is searing, savage and deeply moving: an unforgettably vivid picture of a time of turmoil.

The writing’s assured, considered and lucid, the author’s observations of character wry and acute. He has a real talent for revealing people’s true intentions and why they act the way they do

Mukherjee creates a believable world where the jealousies and rivalries of one family are representative of the country

Memorably vivid and moving

A powerful generational story of the chasm between the haves and have-nots