Kalyan Ray

A tale spanning two centuries and three continents traces the experiences of a young freedom fighter in mid-19th-century Dublin whose best friend and daughter escape the potato famine by moving to America before their respective descendants move toward a fateful convergence.

A Novel

No Country

In November 1989, an Indian couple are discovered murdered in a small town in upstate New York. They lie together as though just disengaged from a long embrace. Yet their murder has been two centuries in the making. County Sligo, Ireland, 1843. Seventeen-year-old Brendan McCarthaigh and his best friend Padraig have everything ahead of them. Quiet Brendan is in love with books and headstrong, spirited Padraig is madly in love with black-haired Brigid. But when the sanctimonious Father Conlon discovers Padraig and Brigid's clandestine affair, he sets in motion a chain of unforeseeable, irrevocable events that will propel one to North America and the other to Bengal. Weaving together private histories and real events, and taking us on a journey across the globe – Kalyan Ray has crafted a sweeping, epic, multigenerational saga spanning two centuries. A rich, compelling tale of home and exile, identity and hybridity, it is also a story of oppression, friendship and compassion, and the few intimate degrees of separation that lie between love and murder.

In November 1989, an Indian couple are discovered murdered in a small town in upstate New York. They lie together as though just disengaged from a long embrace. Yet their murder has been two centuries in the making. County Sligo, Ireland, 1843. Seventeen-year-old Brendan McCarthaigh and his best friend Padraig have everything ahead of them. Quiet Brendan is in love with books and headstrong, spirited Padraig is madly in love with black-haired Brigid. But when the sanctimonious Father Conlon discovers Padraig and Brigid's clandestine affair, he sets in motion a chain of unforeseeable, irrevocable events that will propel one to North America and the other to Bengal. Weaving together private histories and real events, and taking us on a journey across the globe - Kalyan Ray has crafted a sweeping, epic, multigenerational saga spanning two centuries. A rich, compelling tale of home and exile, identity and hybridity, it is also a story of oppression, friendship and compassion, and the few intimate degrees of separation that lie between love and murder.

“A novel as easy to read as the latest bestseller, No Country is a rousing adventure made up out of the blood and guts and dreams of people on three continents and nearly 150 years of troubled history” (Alan Cheuse, NPR). In the poverty of rural Ireland in 1843, Padraig Aherne and Brendan McCarthaigh grew up as brothers, inseparable, even when Padraig falls in love with their beautiful classmate, Brigid. But when Padraig makes a dangerous mistake that forces him onto a ship bound for India, and the deadly potato famine sweeps through their tiny village, Brendan is left alone to care for his best friend’s child, an infant daughter Padraig never knew he had. Eventually, Brendan flees with her aboard one of the infamous “coffin ships,” to begin a new life in America. As Brendan’s and Padraig’s two family trees take root on opposite sides of the world, their tendrils begin to intertwine, moving inexorably toward a disastrous convergence more than a century later. Unfurling against the fickle backdrop of history that includes terrorism on the Indian subcontinent, an East European pogrom, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, and the terrible intimacy of a murder in a sleepy New England town, the fallout from lives torn apart in No Country smolders for generations.

The Empire Writes Back! Irreverent And Witty, Eastwords Is A Powerful Novel That Spans Ages And Continents. East Meets West In Its Cast, Both Real And Imagined, That Includes Shakespeare (The Bardshah ) And Siraj-Ud-Daulah, Oberon And Titania, Robert Clive And Vasco Da Gama, Caliban, Puck And Prospero. Deliciously Tinged With Magical Realism, The Story Comes Alive With Characters Who Take On New Incarnations As The Plot Progresses. The Reader Is Witness To The Reinvention Of Shakespeare On Indian Shores As Puck Metamorphoses, And The Beautiful Sukumari Refashions Herself As The Witch Sycorax. Even The August Shakespeare And Sheikh Piru, The Narrator, Perform A Shape-Shifting Dance In This Fabulous Monsoon-Tormented Narrative, And We Soon Discover What Happens To Ariel In His New-Found Freedom, And Whether Prospero Lives On&Ray S Intoxicating Prose Is Rife With Literary Allusions As Sheikh Piru Leads Us Through The Story, Sharing Asides, Regrets And Private Jokes With The Reader. Sheikh Piru Is At Once Omniscient And Involved, Both Hapless Participant And Detached Observer, In The Great Tradition Of Vyas Himself, Who Was Both The Narrator Of And A Character In The Mahabharata. Drawn From A Variety Of Sources Ranging From Ancient Hindu Mythology To The Literature Of Renaissance England, Eastwords Is A Literary Coup D État That Sets The Colonizers And The Colonized Against A Richly Dramatic Backdrop. Pulsating With Tropical Intensity And Encompassing Treachery As Well As Abiding Love, Grace As Well As Redemption, This Novel Is A Rollicking Read.

Kalyan Ray

About

Books

Join the club