The Past Darkly

"A man's past is not simply a dead history," George Eliot wrote in the sweeping novel Middlemarch . "It is a still quivering part of himself." As an executive summary of A Life Apart — the complex, occasionally overwrought but ultimately satisfying fiction debut of TIME contributor Neel Mukherjee — that pretty much fits the bill. The book was first published as Past Continuous in India, where, along with Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies , it was joint winner of the 2008 Vodafone Crossword Book Award, the country's most prominent prize for English-language writing. The newly entitled edition is slightly revised...

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