A STATE OF FREEDOM

by Neel Mukherjee

(Chatto £16.99) BOOKER- SHORTLISTED Neel Mukherjee’s third novel comprises loosely linked stories set in India. In the first, a wealthy Indian man who lives in America takes his six-year-old son to see the sights in Agra, where the atmosphere becomes increasingly threatening.

The other stories all concern the grinding poverty of the sub-continent. Renu lives in a Mumbai slum and works six jobs as a cook to support her nephew’s university education. Bright little Milly’s educational aspirations end at the age of eight, when she begins life as a live-in servant and is imprisoned in her employers’ flat.

Lakshman sees the acquisition of a bear cub as an opportunity to free his family from poverty by exhibiting the animal as a dancer. It would be hard to say who suffers most, as the scheme badly misfires.

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.