No Country: A Novel

✍ Scribed by Ray, Kalyan

• Book ID: 107900185
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 367 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781451635997

✦ Synopsis

Retail

Spanning two centuries and three continents, from famine-stricken Ireland to colonial India to modern-day upstate New York, No Country is a riveting, enchanting melting pot of a story about history, family, fate, and the enduring ties of friendship.

In rural Ireland in 1843, Padraig Aherne leaves behind his best friend, Brendan, and girlfriend, Brigid, and sets off to Dublin to rally for his country’s independence, unaware that Brigid is pregnant with his child. But once he reaches the big city, a dangerous mistake forces him on a ship destined for Calcutta. As the potato famine devastates their home, Brendan escapes with Padraig’s young daughter across the ocean, aboard one of the infamous “coffin ships” headed for America. As two family trees expand, moving towards a disastrous convergence from opposite sides of the world, Padraig’s descendants struggle to define themselves and find their places in the world. From Padraig’s reckless mother, to his precocious daughter Maeve who grows up to run a farm in Vermont, to Robert, a young policeman in British-era Calcutta who grapples with his mixed-blood heritage as an Anglo-Indian, to Billy Swint, a boy driven blind by his anger at his father, these are profoundly sympathetic women and men who transcend their eras and set up home in our hearts.

Unfurling against the fickle backdrop of history that includes terrorism on the Indian subcontinent, an East European pogrom, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, and the terrible intimacy of a murder in a sleepy New England town, the repercussions of the lives torn apart in No Country will echo through the generations to come. This is a sprawling, ambitious, and endlessly satisfying read about love and its betrayals, hardship, family, and belonging…and how all history is ultimately deeply personal.

**

From Booklist

This epic novel, spanning three continents and multiple generations, probes the nature of family and home. In Ireland in 1843, country lad Padraig Aherne runs into trouble in Dublin and ends up on a ship sailing to Calcutta, where he will make his fortune in the import business even as he is constantly haunted by his memories of Ireland. He leaves behind his girlfriend, Brigid, unaware that she is pregnant, and his best friend, Brendan. Faced with the deprivations of the potato famine, Brendan takes Padraig’s child to Canada, where, sick of their torturous sea journey, they find peace in the rural countryside and become tenant farmers. As the generations unspool, the novel touches on the Indian Partition, New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and the universal struggle of immigrants to find a home in their new countries. Told from multiple perspectives, this thoughtful novel offers a panoramic view of the way personal and national destinies collide, sometimes ending in tragedy, sometimes in triumph. Historical-fiction fans will find much to savor in this rich portrait of the trials and tribulations of immigrants. --Joanne Wilkinson

Review

This sprawling novel gives new, multilayered meaning to that old cliché, “It's a small world.” Ray’s American debut is all about connections—and disconnections.... The variegated colors, tastes and textures of Ray’s narrative, as it moves through multiple points of view, lends a powerful sense of context to both the most trivial and the most tragic of human circumstances. Ray treads the fine line between coincidence and contrivance with bravado and finesse. (Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))

"[A] compelling answer to a primal question: where do I come from?... Readers fond of Salman Rushdie’s subcontinental epics should appreciate Ray’s combination of multigenerational saga and historical canvas, taking in the potato famine, the partition of India, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Ray vividly illustrates the sentiment one of his characters puts down in a letter: '“We all stand at the same great isthmus in the geography of time. We are all related: Our mortality is our one common nation.'" (Publishers Weekly)

Told from multiple perspectives, this thoughtful novel offers a panoramic view of the way personal and national destinies collide, sometimes ending in tragedy, sometimes in triumph. Historical fiction fans will find much to savor in this rich portrait of the trials and tribulations of immigrants. (Booklist)

[W]renching... This compelling tale of cultural interconnectedness is highly recommended. (Library Journal (Starred Review))

An unforgettable journey through lives, continents, and history, No Country leaves you deeply moved. Kalyan Ray shows both the thrill and trauma of immigration in a true and powerful way. A wonderful book. (Lara Vapnyar, award-winning author of The Scent of Pine)

In No Country , anambitious, fascinating and suspenseful novel that spans continents andgenerations, Kalyan Ray deftly draws the reader into the lives of an unusualcast of characters who inhabit worlds as diverse as 19th century rural Ireland, colonial India and present day New York. Ray has painted these characters witha loving intricacy that made me truly care about their hopes, dreams, andtragic reversals of fate. (Chitra Divakaruni, author of Oleander Girl)

This beautifully written, intelligent novel probes the nature of family, nation, and home—of the loyalties and allegiances which comprise identity itself. Beginning in a poor Irish village in 1843 and ending in upstate New York in 1989 by way of India, the story spans many generations and three continents to weave a panoramic tapestry, the very fabric of how we are all connected. This is a moving and compelling tale, full of richly satisfying ironies, and driven by a near-cosmic grasp of how fate and free will play out through our lives. (Enid Shomer, author of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile)