The Odyssey Bookshop: Neel Mukherjee

Join us in person on Thursday April 25 at 7 PM as Neel Mukherjee presents his new novel, Choice. This is the April selection of our First Editions Club.

 About the Book

An ingenious, devastating, explosive novel about the ramifications of choice from "one of the most original and talented authors working today" (NPR).

"How ought one to live?" This is the question that obsesses London-based publisher Ayush, driving him to question every act of consumption. He embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him: his practical economist husband; their twins; and even the authors he edits and publishes. One of those authors, a mysterious M. N. Opie, writes a story about a young academic involved in a car accident that causes her life to veer in an unexpected direction. Another author, an economist, describes how the gift of a cow to an impoverished family on the West Bengal–Bangladesh border sets them on a startling path to tragedy.

Together, these connected narratives raise the question: How free are we really to make our own choices? In a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, Neel Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.

About the Author

Neel Mukherjee is the author of three novels: A Life Apart (2010) won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best work of fiction; The Lives of Others (2014) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Costa best novel award, and won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award for best second novel; A State of Freedom (2018) was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and an NPR, Kirkus, and NYPL book of the year; and Avian (2020) in the Cahier Series. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches in the Creative Writing program in Harvard University.