Description

Told from the perspective of a dog Laura, Our Madhopur Home is a sprawling family saga about homes, displacement, and loss. Spanning three generations and a hundred years, it is a story of people, and it is a story of its times. As the patriarch of the family sees his children grow up and take different directions in their own lives, rural society in Bihar is also in a state of flux around him. Family expands, distance emerges, and between the walls of the house, finding home sometimes becomes difficult.
The realities of the family are intertwined with the fate of the zamindari system, poverty and want lurking in its shadow. While Laura is a loved and loyal member of the household, she is also an inconspicuous observer of the every-day affairs of the house, making her a surprisingly perfect narrator for this story of intimate bonds.
Chronicling the relationships between people and places, dogs and owners, and past and future, Our Madhopur Home is ambitious and compelling, and a worthy addition to the Indian tradition of fiction that combines social history with familial strife, remarkable in its ability to capture the full spectrum of human emotion.

About the author(s)

Born in 1961, Tripurari Sharan joined the Indian Administrative Services after graduating from St Stephens’ College and Jawaharlal Nehru University. Over the years, he has held many important administrative appointments, notable among them being the director of the Film and Television Institute of India and the chief secretary of the Government of Bihar. He is keenly interested in classical music, cinema, and literature, and has published many poems and directed two films in the past. Our Madhopur Home is his debut novel.

Arunava Sinha is an award-winning translator of Bengali fiction, non-fiction and poetry into English. Over 60 of his translations have been published so far in India, and several of them in the UK and the USA. He teaches Creative Writing at Ashoka University and is the Books Editor of the politics and culture magazine Scroll.in. His recently published translations include Taslima Nasreen's Shameless, Bani Basu's Moom, and Desire for Fire: An Anthology of Modern Bengali Poetry. His translation of Ashoke Mukhopadhyay's A Ballad of Remittent Fever was longlisted for the JCB Prize 2020, and his translation of Manoranjan Byapari's There's Gunpowder in the Air was shortlisted for the JCB Prize 2019.