My Beloved Life

'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