About the Book
'A brilliant, bleak moral maze of a novel' Guardian
'Dazzling... by turns comic, lyrical and heartbreaking' Monica Ali
'Profound and beautiful' Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting
'A vital, haunting, devastating read' Sarah Waters
A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift.
These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee's new novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.
Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them.
'A magnificent achievement' Namwali Serpell
'A superb writer... his greatest work yet' Michelle de Kretser
About the Author :
Neel Mukherjee won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010 for his debut novel A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. His most recent novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and heralded as 'Stunning ... a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today' (NPR).
Review :
A brilliant, bleak moral maze of a novel
An exquisitely droll heartbreaker of a book. To be in the company of Mukherjee's cool, calm, all-noticing prose is to experience something like the helpless wonder his characters experience
Neel Mukherjee's blistering, devastating novel paints an unforgettable portrait of a planet on the brink. From London to Eritrea, from the first world to the third, Choice's heroes - teachers, farmers, soldiers, mothers - are people with no choice at all, desperately trying to escape capture of the body and soul by forces they can't begin to understand... A searing indictment of neoliberal folly, a profound and beautiful meditation on compassion, this is exactly the kind of novel that we need now - the kind that nobody but Neel Mukherjee can write.
Beautifully written... There are countless wonderful descriptions.
Choice is funny, horrible, ironic, damning, affecting and deadly serious... The whole book shows that Mukherjee can do plot, dialogue and characterisation as well as anyone... a seriously impressive achievement.
'An engrossing suite of obliquely linked tales... each scenario buzzes with taut drama and waspish satire'
'In his dazzling new novel, Neel Mukherjee dissects how economics rules our lives and impoverishes our souls... Choice is by turns comic, lyrical and heartbreaking. It burns brightly with fierce intelligence, with wisdom and compassion, and achieves what so few novels even attempt: it makes the reader think deeply about how we've come to live this way, at what cost, and about those who pay the greatest price.'
Choice is Mukherjee's best book yet: a brooding meditation on the complexities of agency and duty, freedom and guilt, in a savagely unequal world. It's a vital, haunting, devastating read.
THE reminder of why we need fiction. A masterpiece of the highest order - Neel Mukherjee uses the tools of fiction to illustrate the impact of economics across generations and cultures with such precision that it would be unbearable if not for the equal measure of compassion we feel for these characters...This is Mukherjee giving all he's got, down to the very marrow of his bones. Profound and devastating, Choice is as dark and hauntingly beautiful as it gets.
'A magnificent accomplishment... In each panel of this masterful triptych exquisite prose gradually crescendos to jaw-dropping revelations. Possessed of great moral seriousness, Choice is also very funny in its satirical excoriation of the obsession with calculating life in purely economic terms in so many realms of contemporary life. It is, in short, a deeply human novel, and a humane one... We come to realize that a human life is not simply the result of rational choices but rather, as Mukherjee puts it, the lull between them - a rich and swaying lull, thick with love and responsibility.'
Here is a magnificently clear-eyed portrait of our times lit equally by sorrow and rage. Neel Mukherjee is a superb writer, and Choice is his greatest work yet.
This book speaks to our present moment with such intelligence as to move it from the merely brilliant to the vitally important. Kaleidoscopic yet intimate, philosophical yet affecting, Choice is a stunning, haunting accomplishment.
If the world were a patient, one would like to entrust it to a surgeon like Neel Mukherjee, whose keen eyes, formidable intelligence, masterful scalpel, and compassionate approach would offer us reassurance and hope without any illusion. A powerful novel about many of our contemporary dilemmas, Choice will stay with the readers long after we finish the last line.
Mukherjee is a great novelist. And a moralist in the central English tradition of E. M. Forster and Iris Murdoch. Like those classic novelists, he knows how to clothe ethical conflicts with sweeping narrative and convincing detail... a writer of genius.
Searing, poetic and beautifully brutal, Choice reveals just how far the imagination - when buoyed by courage and conscience - can travel. One realization I take with me from Mukherjee's intrepid prose is this: to be honest in our living, and to refuse despair, is to assent to a whole new vocabulary of humility.
Full of [...] complex, happily contradictory little flowerings of correspondence that can really be appreciated only in retrospect
Mukherjee pulls the reader into these problems with a seriousness and technical excellence that makes a lot of what is published today seem immature. Choice asks much of us readers. But, for all its pessimism, it trusts us to be up to it.
At the level of prose it [Choice] shines. It is always stimulating... You finish the final story dazzled by Mukherjee's ambition and gusto.
