"I was torn from reality the moment I opened my advanced reader's copy. Every preconception and previous memory of Indian American immigrant stories was tossed to the wind. Instead I was engrossed by the book's freshness, raw honesty and deeply compelling characters.
The Sleepwalker's Guide is a book about loss. The book was more true to life than anything I've ever read—absolutely devastating and yet it continues and still there can be moments of cheer, surprise and beauty. I reread the least two chapters several times, unwilling to let the characters rest and fade to memory. Do not miss this debut work from Mira Jacob."
Publisher Random House
Publication Date 2014-07-01
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Stephanie L.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780812994780
For 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.
