Novel titled Family Life written by Akhil Sharma won the Folio Prize 2015

Family Life: Akhil Sharma

Novel titled Family Life written by Akhil Sharma was in news recently because for this novel the author won the Folio Prize for fiction for the year 2015.

The author took 13 years to write this book. Family Life is an autobiographical story of an immigrant family floundering in America.

The book tells the story of Ajay Mishra who moves from Delhi to the United States as a child in the late 1970s. When Ajay's brother has a life-changing accident, it shatters his family's new life.

It is a heart-wrenching and darkly comic story of a boy torn between duty and survival. It is a masterful novel of distilled complexity: about catastrophe and survival; attachment and independence; the tension between selfishness and responsibility.

This was the second novel written by Akhil Sharma. His first novel was An Obedient Father which had won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2001.