A State of Freedom

This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity—a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece!

Edmund White

Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you've turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.

Karen Joy Fowler

An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own.

Rose Tremain

A compelling read set in contemporary India that explores the attempts of five characters, each in different circumstances, to exchange the life they are leading for something better

Bookseller

A State of Freedom is an extraordinary achievement. Subtle and multi-layered, it's a study of the brutality of social divisions, written with tremendous tenderness; a work that insists on the dignity of figures obliged to lead undignified lives. A powerful, troubling novel. The moment I finished it, I began it again.

Sarah Waters

Neel Mukherjee's breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a furious, unsparing, clear-eyed study of how a society's gross inequities of money and power demean and deform the human condition. The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time.

Hanya Yanagihara

A State of Freedom is a novel like no other -- its prose is so rich, unequivocally precise and graceful that it allows Mukherjee to illustrate the most horrific of experiences with stunning compassion. A State of Freedom is more than a novel—it is an immersive experience. He writes like a painter, his language is his palette, one reminiscent of the late Howard Hodgkin's. Mukherjee brings to life the variation of India’s cities and towns in a dense multi-layered world where modern life, by accident or intention, tears at traditions that are centuries old. Throughout we are reminded of how little power many have over their lives and of emotional and financial economies so fragile that something as small as a single egg can carry great weight.

A.M. Homes

an extraordinary account of the tenacious will to survive… He seeds his tales with images of unexpected beauty… Freedom here is relative, complicated, fissured and often won at another’s expense

Siobhain Murphy, The Times

The beauty of Mukherjee’s prose sucks the reader into an alternative world, where misery, deprivation and the struggle to exist another day are normal

John Harding, Daily Mail

Neel Mukherjee shows himself to be one of those contemporary authors who invites readers to make connections between seemingly disparate story strands… Combined with Mukherjee’s rich realisation of the novel’s individual elements, this indeterminacy makes A State of Freedom a powerful, memorable treatment of a theme too often reduced to uninvolving didacticism

Adam Lively, Sunday Times

He does what good novelists should, which is to hold up a mirror to society and remind people that what passes for normal is often barbaric. His quiet observation is effective – and damning

Economist

Mukherjee… homes in on the restless, the disinherited, the socially trapped… Mercilessly observant, he does not spare the reader but leavens scenes of savagery, squalor and despair with moments of rainbow vividness, all the more striking for the muddy, cacophonous backdrop from which they are brought forth… In a significant and porous work, Mukherjee gives congruence and visibility to these fractured, hidden lives

Catherine Taylor, New Statesman

Set in contemporary India, technically daring, deeply compassionate, it’s a powerful, pertinent novel about migration and social injustice

Sarah Waters, Guardian

Each story is intimate and universal, concrete and elusive… A State of Freedom is ambitious, and it succeeds on all levels

Eoin McNamee, Irish Times

A brilliant novel, deeply compassionate and painterly, reminding me of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings. Mukherjee brings to life the colours and sounds of a place where modern life is constantly crashing against tradition

AM Homes, Observer

Bleak and beautifully written

Anthony Cummins, Observer

Mukherjee’s characters are so well drawn and their plights so affecting that we stop quibbling over how to categorise the book and simply lose ourselves in masterful storytelling… Random bouts of cruelty… unfold in electrifying prose

Malcolm Forbes, Herald

Narrated with the precise realism that we have come to expect of Neel Mukherjee’s novels… A State of Freedom resonates with intricate and disturbing echoes… Mukherjee has created an India that is always graspable and always elusive

Tabish Khair, Times Literary Supplement

Very powerful, very well written

Geoffrey Durham, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

A thing of wonder… does what a great novel should do… one of the most wonderful novels I’ve read for ages and ages… such wonderful high calibre writing’

Deborah Moggach, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

Brilliant… I couldn’t put it down…everything about it rang true… so gripping, so thrilling

Kate Williams, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

A splendidly rich and affirmative novel

Allan Massie, Scotsman

In Mukherjee’s hands familiar fare is elevated by his empathy for the poor and the journalistic efforts he undertakes to understand them… his best work yet… This bleak and entirely justified vision of modern India is what binds together Mukherjee’s stories and indeed his oeuvre

Sonia Faleiro, Financial Times

An especially searing account of state oppression and Communist terror… everything is held together by Mukherjee’s wonderfully inventive prose style

Tanjil Rashid, Prospect

An exceptional portrait of modern India – and one of the best novels this year

Metro

Mukherjee confronts us with the deranged performances of both master and slave… A State of Freedom’s artfully handled piecing together of story fragments is held in tension by a counterforce of textual disintegration

Kate Webb, Spectator

This novel paints a vivid picture of modern India, its beauty and its benightedness, examining the relationship between identity and migration. Mukherjee is pitch-perfect in his descriptions of Indian life and unsparing in chronicling the poverty, deprivation and superstition that blights the nation. The book’s themes are important and the writing powerful, in places shocking

Richard Hopton, Country & Town House

Harsh and vibrant… Mukherjee’s deep knowledge of India and the West, allied to his never-failing curiosity about the ties that both bind us and separate us, makes him an outstanding chronicler of Bengali life, seen from within and without… In an age when so many fiction writers flimflam around in a cloud of unknowing, Mukherjee has an eagle’s eye for the truth

Rose Tremain, New Statesman

It’s a brave and frequently devastating novel whose themes of displacement and dehumanisation are all too timely

Paul Murray, Observer

The last book that made my heart race? That’d be Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom: completely propulsive and horrifying and astonishing

Hanya Yanagihara, Guardian

A powerful novel about alienation and the illusion of freedom.

Hannah Beckerman, The Observer

Stories of displacement, alienation and inequality add up to dynamic, life-affirming symphony – albeit one punctuated with discordant and unsettling notes.

Juanita Coulson, The Lady

Mukherjee confronts head-on the appalling deprivation and the caste stigma that bedevil so many lives, and the result is as powerful as it is disturbing.

Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

Mesmerising complexity and the sharpness mixed with compassion and empathy. All the stories are beautifully written… Long after I finished it I realized the characters were still with me, vivid, compelling, haunting

Elif Shafak, Guardian