A Life Apart

Ritwik, twenty-two and orphaned, escapes from Calcutta to England, to start his life all over again. But his all-consuming relationship with his mother is a minefield he must first navigate. Will Ritwik find salvation through the story of an Englishwoman in Raj-era Bengal or through the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne Cameron, who gives shelter to Ritwik in London in exchange for the care that she needs? As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall. Unsentimental yet full of compassion, and written with unrelenting honesty, this scalding debut is about dislocation and alienation, outsiders and losers, the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories, and the consolations of storytelling.