An Obedient Father

An Obedient Father introduced one of the most admired voices in contemporary fiction. Set in Delhi in the 1990s, it tells the story of an inept bureaucrat enmired in corruption, and of the daughter who alone knows the true depth of his crimes. 

Decried in India for its frank treatment of child abuse, the novel was widely praised elsewhere for its compassion, and for a plot that mingled the domestic with the political, tragedy with farce. Yet, as Akhil Sharma writes in his foreword to this new edition, he was haunted by what he considered shortcomings within the book: almost twenty years later, he returned to face them. Here is the result, a leaner, surer version with even greater power.

“Something white-rhino rare in the history of literature: [Sharma has] revised and radically rewritten a novel, his first, An Obedient Father, one he published 22 years earlier . . . Sharma approached each page of the new version with extraordinary vigor and care, and there is scarcely a paragraph that hasn’t been improved . . . The sentences, already pure and unfussy, have been purged of any show. What is left is a closer feeling of closeness to his characters — to ugly, sorrowing, tender, stalwart, ruined, unredeemable people, failing at their lives and yet trying, still, to live them.”

—Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Magazine

“Sharma depicts a country that could have sprung from a mind poised somewhere between Dostoevsky’s and Gogol’s . . . The book is actually quite funny to begin with . . . As the book goes on, though, you pick up on the particularly unpleasant way Karam manages to extort money; also on the fact that corruption is an unstoppable process, no more preventable than the weather. . . . I doubt I have seen a more audacious yet plausible portrayal of a vividly unsympathetic character . . . Quite astonishingly, Sharma manages to make us squeeze out some sympathy for his anti-hero . . . Sharma’s genius in this novel is how he makes the personal and political reflect on each other.” 

—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

“The first chapter of An Obedient Father blasts off the locks and splinters the wood . . . This is an uncompromising novel, a portrait of a country ravaged by vendetta and graft, its public spaces loud with the complaints of religious bigots and its private spaces cradling unspeakable pain.” 

—Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books

“A supernova in the galaxy of young, talented Indian writers, Sharma debuts with a bold and shocking novel that casts a mesmerizing spell . . . Sharma's depiction of a society riddled with graft, violent religious prejudice, male chauvinism and bigoted cultural attitudes is a cautionary tale about what happens to the individual spirit when poverty, superstition, racial tension and general hopelessness are exacerbated by the absence of judicial morality. This caustic yet darkly comic story resonates powerfully, as the reader comes to sympathize with fallible human beings trapped in circumstances that corrupt the soul.”

—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Rich and enthralling . . . Mr. Sharma’s novel weaves the national into the personal without a trace of the didactic. What is more astonishing is his success in joining the amiably picaresque aspects of the corruption—India’s and Ram’s—with the ghastly evil of its underside . . . Stunning dramatically, psychologically, and in terms of the constraints on Indian women.” 

—Richard Eder, The New York Times

“‘Obedient’ hardly describes Ram Karan, the antihero of Akhil Sharma’s suspenseful and haunting first novel, An Obedient Father . . . Karan’s corruptness is a metaphor for India’s loss of innocence after the massacres of 1947 unhinged the country . . . What makes the story compelling is not whether Karan gets what he deserves, or whether he deserves it (he does); more forceful is the way Sharma leads us to understand and even sympathize with him . . . [A] powerful portrait of India during partition—a place where despair was so thoroughgoing that for some the promise of leaving India was the only hope left.”

—Diane Mehta, BOMB Magazine

“A great novel.” 

—Jonathan Franzen, New York Magazine

“The myriad culture clashes of modern India—holy Ganges water in a Superman thermos, Sanskrit prayers and lip-synching contests—are served up with a light touch in Akhil Sharma’s funny, subtle first novel, An Obedient Father . . . [A] moving, persuasive tragicomedy. A”

—Suzanne Ruta, Entertainment Weekly

“An Obedient Father poses a serious challenge to a reviewer who is tempted to take refuge in the easiest, moralizing dismissal of this unusual novel . . . the maddening narrative voice is as darkly hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoevsky . . . An Obedient Father is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote The God of Small Things. It is certainly the novel that Raj Kamal Jha came close to writing when in The Blue Bedspread he plumbed the dark ambiguities of abuse and incest. Sharma’s novel is part of a brilliant coming of age in Indian fiction.” 

—Amitava Kumar, The Nation

“A tremendous book.” 

—J. M. Coetzee

Akhil Sharma grew up in Delhi and in Edison, New Jersey. His first novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Family Life, received the International Dublin Literary Award and the Folio Prize. His stories, collected in A Life of Adventure and Delight, have appeared in the New Yorker and in Best American Short Stories. He lives and teaches in Durham, North Carolina.

An Obedient Father • Paperback ISBN: 9781946022387

Jul 12, 2022  • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 8

5" x 8.5" • 288 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022394