Manu Joseph

Journalist Ousep Chacko wonders about his seemingly happy artist son's suspicious falling death and obsessively questions the youth's friends at the same time his other son falls for a secretive older girl.

The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel

Ayyan Mani, a member of India's lowest caste and resident of the slums of Mubmai, discovers an illicit romance between his married boss and a married female researcher at the institute where he works. Original.

Serious Men: A Novel

Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous

Na de zelfmoord van zijn 17-jarige veelbelovende zoon wordt een Indiase man bezeten door de vraag naar het waarom.

Het onzichtbare geluk van andere mensen / druk 1

In this searing and darkly hilarious diagnosis of contemporary Indian society, acclaimed writer Manu Joseph explores why the poor don’t rise in revolt against the rich despite living in one of the most unequal regions of the world.

The poor know how much we spend in a single day, on a single meal, the price of Atlantic salmon and avocados. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘do they tolerate it? Why don’t they crawl out from their catastrophes and finish us off? Why don’t little men emerge from manholes and attack the cars? Why don’t the maids, who squat like frogs beside kitchen sinks, pull out the hair of their conscientious madams who never give them a day off? Why is there peace?’

Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us shows us in pitiless detail just how hypocritical and exploitative people of privilege are, and it also shows us how and why they get away with it. It’s a sharp, witty, and perceptive critique of the many faults of the India we live in.

The Psychology of Indians

Why The Poor Don’t Kill Us

رجال مهمون

Ousep Chacko, journalist and failed novelist, prides himself on being “the last of the real men.” His wife, Mariamma, finds ways to feed her family despite their lack of money, but in her spare time she fantasizes about Ousep’s early death. One day, their seventeen-year-old son, Unni—a boy obsessed with comics—does something terrible and inexplicable. Ousep and Mariamma separately try to solve the mystery of Unni’s action but find no answers. Three years later, Ousep receives a package that sends him back to the search. He starts to hound his son’s friends and a famous neurosurgeon. Meanwhile, younger son Thoma—a twelve-year-old with below-sea-level self-esteem—falls desperately in love with their haughty, beautiful teenage neighbour, who has her own secrets. The Illicit Happiness of Other People—a smart, wry and poignant novel—is part mystery, part philosophy and part unlikely love story.

The Illicit Happiness Of Other People

Der siebzehnjährige Unni Chacko hat etwas Schreckliches getan. Drei Jahre nach seinem Selbstmord erhält sein Vater, der Journalist Ousep Chacko, mit der Post ein Päckchen mit einem Comic seines künstlerisch hochbegabten Sohnes Unni - ein Irrläufer, der Ousep erneut auf die Suche nach den Gründen für den Tod seines Sohnes schickt. Er befragt seine ehemaligen Freunde, besucht Treffen der Comic-Zeichner, belästigt einen berühmten Neuropsychiater, entdeckt das ungewöhnliche Leben seines Sohnes und dringt zugleich immer tiefer in die Geheimnisse der eigenen Familie ein. Der Roman, der in den 1990er Jahren in Madras spielt, klug, scharfsinnig, komisch und sehr anrührend, erzählt vom Leben einer schwer gebeutelten Familie, von Wahrheitssuche und Liebe, spannend und herzzerreißend.

Roman

Das verbotene Glück der anderen

Il gioco di Ayyan

Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize and shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Ayyan Mani is a man born to greater things, which wouldn't surprise his neighbours in the vast tenement building in which he lives, where to be sober and employed practically makes a man a legend. He works as an assistant at the Institute of Theory and Research, where he studies with amusement and envy the public battles and private love affairs of the squabbling scientists. But when an opportunity for betterment presents itself in the form of his 'gifted' ten-year-old son Adi, father and son embark on an outrageous ruse that will have far-reaching consequences. Manu Joseph's archly comic debut is a tale of a man's attempt to elevate himself and his family above the banality of ordinary existence.

Manu Joseph

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