Choice by Neel Mukherjee

Neel Mukherjee is the author of A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction; The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and received the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award for best second novel; and A State of Freedom (2018), which was among the New York Times’ ‘100 Notable Books of the Year’, and a Kirkus, National Public Radio, and New York Public Library book of the year in the USA. His book for the Cahiers Series is called Avian (2020). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and divides his time between London and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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.

'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.‘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.’

'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—or each movement of this classical sonata—exquisite prose gradually crescendos to jaw-dropping revelations … Choice is a deeply human novel, and a humane one … We come to realize, to feel through experiencing the successive waves of the novel’s movements, that a human life is not simply the result of rational choices but rather, as Neel Mukherjee puts it, the lull between them—a rich and swaying lull, thick with love and responsibility.’‘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.’‘Neel Mukherjee is a great novelist … He knows how to clothe ethical conflicts with sweeping narrative and convincing detail. The range of his knowledge — from London intellectual and professional life today to the precarious hardships of the ‘ultra-poor’ in Bengal—is shockingly deep. He is a writer of genius.’‘Neel Mukherjee’s keen eyes, formidable intelligence, masterful scalpel, and compassionate approach offer us reassurance and hope without any illusion.’‘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.