Akhil Sharma – författare

WINNER OF THE 2016 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDWINNER OF THE FOLIO PRIZE 2015For eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju, life in Dehli in the late 1970s follows a comfortable, predictable routine: bathing on the roof, queuing for milk, playing cricket in the street. Yet, everything changes when their father finds a job in America - a land of carpets and elevators, swimsuits and hot water on tap. Life is exciting for the two brothers as they adjust to prosperity, girls and 24-hour TV, until one hot, sultry day when everything falls apart. Darkly comic, Family Life is a story of a boy torn between duty and survival amid the ruins of everything he once knew.

Known for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.Growing up in Delhi in 1978, eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju play cricket on the streets, eagerly waiting for the day they can join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more—until tragedy strikes. Young Ajay prays to a God he envisions as Superman, searching for direction amid the ruins of his family's new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.

Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life.Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.

Hailed as a storyteller whose fiction is “a glowing work of art” (Wall Street Journal), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice “as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky” (The Nation). In A Life of Adventure and Delight, Sharma delivers eight masterful stories that focus on Indian protagonists at home and abroad and that plunge the reader into the unpredictable workings of the human heart. A young woman in an arranged marriage awakens one day surprised to find herself in love with her husband. A retired divorcé tries to become the perfect partner by reading women’s magazines. A man’s longstanding contempt for his cousin suddenly shifts inward when he witnesses his cousin caring for a sick woman. Tender and darkly comic, the protagonists in A Life of Adventure and Delight deceive themselves and engage in odd behaviors as they navigate how to be good, how to make meaningful relationships, and the strengths and pitfalls of self-interest. Elegantly written and emotionally immediate, the stories provide an intimate, honest assessment of human relationships between mothers and sons, sons and lovers, and husband and wives from a dazzlingly original, critically acclaimed writer.

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Delhi school system, lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his eight-year-old granddaughter. Bumbling, contradictory, sad, Ram is a man corroded by a guilty secret. An Obedient Father takes the reader to an India that is both far away and real - into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, and ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky's anti-heroes.

In these elegant, unsparing and intimate stories, the Folio Prize-winning author, Akhil Sharma, exposes the paradoxes, ironies and harmonies that characterise modern life. Marrying the minimalism of Chekhov and Carver with a flair for dark comedy, A Life of Adventure and Delight is a collection full of wisdom, wonder and reflection.

This fascinating book delves into the transformative role that blockchain technology could play in the security and integrity of patient data within the healthcare sector.In an era where data breaches and privacy concerns loom large, blockchain has emerged as a potential solution to these challenges, offering a route to streamline healthcare processes, manage data and improve patient outcomes. The book begins by providing a comprehensive overview of its underlying principles, including decentralization, immutability and consensus mechanisms, before exploring, through a range of international cases studies, how blockchain has been applied so far within the healthcare sector, from the management of electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical trials to medical billing and supply chain management. The authors also explore the barriers to the wider adoption of blockchain, including financial investment and regulatory issues.The first book to focus solely on the potential of blockchain within the healthcare sector, it will appeal to international scholars, students and healthcare professionals interested in issues around patient confidentiality, data security and IT management.

Save time, improve stability, and optimize program memory while building decentralized applications on a blockchain using the features and capabilities of Rust Key FeaturesImplement peer-to-peer blockchain using features of the Rust programming languageUse Rust to build dApps on popular blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and NEAROptimize Rust code and enhance security updates to deploy a blockchain to productionPurchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBookBook DescriptionBefore Rust, blockchain developers didn’t have a systems programming language that was type-safe, fast, and, at the same time, had stable and easy memory management. Rust proved to be a boon for developers and works as the perfect solution for not only blockchain and protocol development but also dApp development.Rust for Blockchain Application Development focuses on demonstrating solutions that can help blockchain developers productize decentralized applications using Rust, which is a complex language with a steep learning curve.This book starts with basic Rust language concepts and then builds on these concepts to enable you to develop your own blockchain from scratch. As you progress, you’ll learn how to build dApps on popular chains like Solana and NEAR. You’ll also be guided through creating Ethereum dApps using Foundry (Rust). Finally, you’ll develop a custom blockchain using Substrate by Parity (Polkadot). The book provides a complete 360-degree view of Rust in the blockchain ecosystem.By the end of this Rust book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of how to apply your Rust knowledge to building dApps and blockchains from scratch.What you will learnUnderstand essential Rust concepts required to build blockchainApply blockchain features such as nodes and p2 communication using RustUnderstand and implement consensus in blockchainBuild and deploy a dApp on Ethereum with the Foundry framework in RustDevelop and deploy a dApp on Solana and the NEAR protocolBuild a custom blockchain using the Substrate framework by PolkadotWho this book is forThis Rust programming book is for blockchain developers interested in building dApps on popular blockchains using Rust. Blockchain architects wanting to save time required to go through documentation and understand each technology can also use this book as a quick-start guide. Experience in building applications on blockchain is required, and familiarity with Rust will be helpful but not necessary.