Neel Mukherjee, Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival

As part of the Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival, Booker nominee Neel Mukherajee discusses his latest novel, a stunningly vivid family saga set in 1960s India.

Neel Murkherjee is interested in India’s outsiders, those who choose to leave or vanish from society. A Life Apart (2010) follows a gay man fleeing Calcutta to seek freedom in England, while new novel the The Lives of Others centres on the scion of a rich paper-producing family who leaves their home to become a dissident. Set in the late 1960s, The Lives is part vivid family saga, part unsparing societal critique, exposing the terrible cost of bourgeoisie Indian life at a moment of turbulent change.  Murkerjee’s prose, spare and precise, is hypnotic. The novel has been shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize . 

This is a rare and exciting chance to see one of the most talented new literary voices, and to gain an insight into this absorbing new novel.