A Play for the End of the World

A Novel

By: Jai Chakrabarti

Narrated by: Brittany Pressley

Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

A dazzling novel—set in early 1970s New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of World War II, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance.

“Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history ... an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion

New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.

Traveling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.

An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

©2021 Jai Chakrabarti (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award’s Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction • Named the Jewish Fiction Award Honor Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries • Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award • Oprah Daily’s “30 of the Best Fall Books of 2021 to Cuddle Up With” • Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s “Books of the Month\" • Alma’s “Favorite Books for Fall 2021” • Paperback Paris’s “Debut Books We’re Excited To Read” • Jewish Insider’s “10 new books to read in September”

“A Play for the End of the World looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history. Jai Chakrabarti is a lyrical writer, and this is an impressive debut.”—Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion

“Like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, Chakrabarti explores his flawed, bewildered characters’ fine-grained emotional shifts when confronted with confusing, violent political movements. . . . These novelists are, at their hearts, elegists for time gone by."—The Washington Post

"The haunted man at the heart of Jai Chakrabarti’s A Play for the End of the World is one of the few survivors of a generation, a Polish immigrant in New York who can’t forget the makeshift family that was transported to Treblinka without him. . . . As the novel moves between [America and India] with interludes that return to the Warsaw ghetto, we come to understand Jaryk’s guilt-stricken ‘need to burrow into oblivion’—and to hope that another need will somehow uproot it.”—The New York Times Book Review

Tearfully beautiful!

I highly recommend this audio version. It made me laugh and cry alternately. The characters were beautifully described and very relatable. Please write another book , Mr Chakrabarti!

I can’t believe this is a debut novel

This novel stuns with its scope, brilliance and eloquence. It’s the kind of book where you keep a pen handy to jot down sentences and descriptions so beautiful, so perfectly wrought, that they could exist apart from the work as lines of poetry, philosophical statements, or reflections about the entirety of the human condition. I’m awestruck.

Superb!

Every word spun a glorious tale of unforgettable lives. Recommended for any reader who loves a good story!

A Survivor’s Next Steps

It’s gutsy to write a novel that evokes both the tragedy of murdered Jewish orphans in the World War II Warsaw ghetto and the hopefulness of Indian refugee children following the creation of Bangladesh. Jai Chakrabarti imagines both worlds and adds in a New York City romance. The figure who ties the stories together is Jaryk Smith, who as a child escaped the train taking the orphans to the Treblinka death camp. Long after the war, he ends up in New York City, romancing a Southern girl. He hangs out with the only other survivor of the Warsaw orphanage, then travels to India. He becomes involved in a children’s production of a play, where he befriends the young survivor of another calamity. Chakrabarti deals thoughtfully with questions of altruism, duty and loyalty. This was an unusual and rewarding novel.

The narration was good, especially the parts read by Brittany Pressley.

TLDR; Not for a South Asian audience

This story has a beautiful and powerful theme and premise, but lacks fulfillment of its potential. There are moments when the story shines in its ability to connect us to our shared humanity. However, this story is tainted by its portrayal of India through a white gaze. There is no opportunity for any of the Indian characters to speak through their own voice. This is further exacerbated by the narrators’ horrific Indian accents and butchering of Indian names/places/words. It’s hard to believe this book was written by an Indian author as any respect for the Indian culture is stripped away by the ignorant narration and white savior mentality of the protagonist.

Disappointing

Thought the premise was interesting especially the production of the play in 1942, I would have liked to have heard more about that and the main characters escape as a child. Although the characters - the love interest -were likeable I thought the relationship was unbelievable. I did not like listening to the male reader at all.