Scenes from Early Life

Scenes from Early Life - Paperback

$23.99
Sale price  $23.99 Regular price 
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Scenes from Early Life

Scenes from Early Life - Paperback

by Philip Hensher
$23.99
Sale price  $23.99 Regular price 

Book Overview

"Beautifully packed with detail . . . Does for Bangladesh what Rushdie did for India." --The Sunday Times


From the Man Booker-short-listed author of The Northern Clemency, a family and a nation--Bangladesh--are forged through storytelling, conversation, jokes, feuds, blood, songs, bravery, and sacrifice.
In late 1970 a boy named Saadi is born into a large, defiantly Bengali family in eastern Pakistan. Months later the country splits in two in what will become one of the most ferocious twentieth-century civil wars. Saadi tells the story of his childhood and of the ingenious ways his family survived the violence and conflicts: from his aunts stuffing him with sweets to stop marauding soldiers from hearing him cry, to street games based on American television shows; from the basement compartment his grandfather built to hide his treasured books, pictures, and music until after the war, to the daily gossip about each and every one of the relatives, servants, and neighbors. Scenes from Early Life is a beautifully detailed novel of profound empathy--an attempt to capture the collective memory of a family and a country.
At once heartbreaking and surprisingly funny, Scenes from Early Life is based on the life of Philip Hensher's husband, and as such it is at once a memoir, a novel, and a history. As this remarkable writer brings the past to life, we come to feel, vividly and viscerally, that Saadi's family--and its struggles and triumphs--are our own.
ISBN9780865478053
Author Philip Hensher
PublisherFarrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedJanuary 2014
LanguageENG- English
Pages320
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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About Philip Hensher

Philip Hensher's novels include Kitchen Venom, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Mulberry Empire, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Chosen by Granta as one of its best young British novelists, he is professor of creative writing at Exeter University and a columnist for The Independent. He lives in London.

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