Mira Jacob – författare

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME, BUZZFEED, ESQUIRE, LIBRARY JOURNAL AND KIRKUS REVIEWSLONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD‘Hilarious and heart-rending’ Celeste Ng‘Heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humour. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love’ TimeHow brown is too brown?Can Indians be racist?What does real love between really different people look like?Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything – and as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers.Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation – and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.‘Helps us think with grace and disarming wit … Reading these searching, often hilarious tête-à-têtes is as effortless as eavesdropping on a crosstown bus … Magic’ New York Times Book Review‘Vibrant, inventive and vulnerable … Good Talk attempts to answer, with humour and heart, some of the most difficult questions of all’ Bustle‘Moving and very funny’ Esquire

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE BOSTON GLOBE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BUSTLE, AND EMILY GOULD, THE MILLIONSFor fans of J. Courtney Sullivan, Meg Wolitzer, Mona Simpson, and Jhumpa Lahiri comes a winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past.  With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life’s uncertainties.   Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, prone to exaggeration, tells their daughter, Amina, a photographer living in Seattle.   Reluctantly Amina returns home and finds a situation that is far more complicated than her mother let on, with roots in a trip the family, including Amina’s rebellious brother Akhil, took to India twenty years earlier. Confronted by Thomas’s unwillingness to explain himself, strange looks from the hospital staff, and a series of puzzling items buried in her mother’s garden, Amina soon realizes that the only way she can help her father is by coming to terms with her family’s painful past. In doing so, she must reckon with the ghosts that haunt all of the Eapens.  Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.  “With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.”—People   “Optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty.”—Associated Press   “By turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion . . . [Jacob’s] characters shimmer with life.”—Entertainment Weekly   “A rich, engrossing debut told with lightness and care.”—The Kansas City Star   “[A] sprawling, poignant, often humorous novel . . . Told with humor and sympathy for its characters, the book serves as a bittersweet lesson in the binding power of family, even when we seek to break out from it.”—O: The Oprah Magazine   “Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow. . . . When her plot springs surprises, she lets them happen just as they do in life: blindsidingly right in the middle of things.”—The Boston Globe   “This is an effortlessly gorgeous and rich book. Its prose is lovely and precise, alternately luminous and direct; its observations of people and families and the physical world are poignant and a delight. The dialogue is sharp, funny, and true. This is a triumphant debut!”—Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!   “Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable; . . . both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)From the Trade Paperback edition.

Of all the family gatherings in her childhood, one stands out in Amina''s memory. It is 1979, in Salem India, when a visit to her grandmother''s house escalates into an explosive encounter, pitching brother against brother, mother against son. In its aftermath, Amina''s father Thomas rushes his family back to their new home in America. And while at first it seems that the intercontinental flight has taken them out of harm''s way, his decision sets off a chain of events that will forever haunt Thomas and his wife Kamala; their intellectually furious son, Akhil and the watchful young Amina. Now, twenty years later, Amina receives a phone call from her mother. Thomas has been acting strangely and Kamala needs her daughter back. Amina returns to the New Mexico of her childhood, where her mother has always filled silences with food, only to discover that getting to the truth is not as easy as going home. Confronted with Thomas''s unwillingness to talk, Kamala''s Born Again convictions, and the suspicion that not everything is what it seems, Amina finds herself at the centre of a mystery so tangled that to make any headway, she has to excavate her family''s painful past. And in doing so she must lay her own ghosts to rest.