Astonishing and brilliant: A State of Freedom, the new novel from Neel Mukherjee
More about the book!

A State of Freedom, the new novel from Neel Mukherjee, will be out from Penguin Random House South Africa this month.

Mukherjee is the author of two previous novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel.

‘The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time.’

—Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life

About the book:

What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? Can we transform the possibilities we are born into?

A State of Freedom prises open the central, defining events of our century – displacement and migration – but not as you imagine them. Five characters, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more.

Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives – formally daring, fierce but full of pity – delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

Watch Mukherjee talking about the book: