Ghachar Ghochar - Softcover

Vivek Shanbhag is the author of eight works of fiction and two plays, all of which have been published to wide acclaim in the South Indian language of Kannada. Ghachar Ghochar is the first of his books to appear in English. He is the recipient of a Fall 2016 residency at the International Writing Program at Iowa. Srinath Perur (translator) is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in n+1, Granta, and the Guardian. He is the author of If It's Monday It Must Be Madurai, published by Penguin India.

''A firecracker of a novel...concise and mesmerizing.'' --Publishers Weekly, Boxed & Starred Review

''In this exquisitely observed, wry and moving novel, the smallest detail can conjure entire worlds of feeling. Vivek Shanbhag is a writer of rare and wonderful gifts.'' --Garth Greenwell, National Book Award longlisted author of What Belongs to You

''One of my favorite contemporary writers in English translates one of the leading figures of Kannada literature. The result is mesmerizing, distressing-and altogether brilliant.'' --Karan Mahajan, National Book Award longlisted author of The Association of Small Bombs

''Vivek Shanbhag is one of those writers whose voice takes your breath away at the first encounter. Ghachar Ghochar presents life and its undercurrents with limpid prose and quiet insight.'' --Yiyun Li, author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

''Tenderly alert to the new passions and disappointments of a 'rising' bourgeoisie, and handling its complex material with brilliant artistic economy, Ghachar Ghochar is one of the best novels to have come out of India in recent decades.'' --Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire

''How did Shanbhag manage to pack so much, so effortlessly and lucidly, into just over a hundred pages? Ghachar Ghochar is a book of distilled simplicity, its surface of seeming artlessness hiding that most complex and complicated of things -- truthfully rendered human life. Beautiful, tense, surprising, utterly convincing and wise, and translated with real inspiration by Srinath Perur.'' --Neel Mukherjee, Booker shortlisted author of The Lives of Others

''A remarkable novel about the fragile civilities of bourgeois life. The reader becomes absorbed in the unforgiving self-knowledge and expansive humanity contained in every page.'' --Amit Chaudhuri, author of Freedom Song and Odysseus Abroad

''Ghachar Ghochar is one of the most striking novels you'll read this decade. . . . In Shanbhag's hands, the Indian family is revealed in layers; as one layer peels away, what lies beneath is left raw and exposed.'' --Nilanjana Roy, Business Standard (India)

''This is a superb novel, unsettling and even claustrophobic . . . but also moving and genuinely funny.'' --The Hindu (India)

''Very rarely a book comes along that you want to thrust in the hands of everyone -- readers and non-readers. Ghachar Ghochar is one such book.'' --Prajwal Parajuly, The Hindustan Times (India)

''Altogether a delight to read . . . Shanbhag gives us an insider's feel for the concerns that have shaped the middle class in the last half a century.'' --Girish Karnad, The Indian Express (India)

''An ingenious tale of how material wealth robs a family of its moral fortitude . . . [Shanbhag] is obviously a master of the form.'' --Mint (India)

''Truly a must-read.'' --The Navhind Times (India)

''Ghachar Ghochar reveals a consummate fiction writer at the height of his powers. . . . a literary sensation across India.'' --Scroll.in (India)

''A compact novel that crackles with tension.'' --Kirkus Reviews