My Beloved Life

By: Amitava Kumar

Narrated by: Amitava Kumar

Read by the author, Amitava Kumar.

'This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling.' – Salman Rushdie

'Kumar's late father’s life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story . . . Always deeply human; the heart is everywhere in these pages . . . beautiful, truthful fiction.' – James Wood, The New Yorker

A novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi.

Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States – whose perspective sheds kts own light on his story.

All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India – from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID – and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu's lives.

Amitava Kumar's remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence.

'A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted and revised.' – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

Critic reviews

This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling. A father, a daughter, a crime, a country being born, a migration, another country, a plague. “We are in touch with a great astonishing mystery when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness. Everything else is ordinary,” Kumar writes. His novel offers magnificent witness, and is not ordinary but extraordinary. (Salman Rushdie)

Always deeply human, the heart is everywhere in these pages . . . Kumar's beautiful, truthful fiction rings with gratitude and anticipated grief. (James Wood, The New Yorker)

Shows what good fiction can achieve . . . A highly sophisticated, self-aware novel from a writer operating at the peak of his powers (The Federal (India))

Alienation and guilt, the emotional markers of migration, loom large in Kumar's ambitious and deceptive novel

A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted and revised. (Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies)

Amitava Kumar has the precious ability to write across borders and cultures. (Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland)

A majestic Indian family saga in successive bildungsroman narratives of a father and daughter . . . Kumar excels at blending mysticism and a refined cosmopolitan perspective. (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

An immersive, moving portrait . . . both of India over 85 years and of the whipsawing experience of being an Indian citizen of the larger world . . . that steadily gathers intensity, vividness, and surprise. ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

Both ambitious in its scope and deeply personal . . . a near-irresistible story of how no life is without consequence