First published by a small press in India, Jerry Pinto's devastatingly original debut novel has already taken the literary world by storm. Suffused with compassion, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Em and the Big Hoom is a modern masterpiece, and its American publication is certain to be one of the major literary events of the season.
Meet Imelda and Augustine, or—as our young narrator calls his unusual parents—Em and the Big Hoom. Most of the time, Em smokes endless beedies and sings her way through life. She is the sun around which everyone else orbits. But as enchanting and high-spirited as she can be, when Em's bipolar disorder seizes her she becomes monstrous, sometimes with calamitous consequences for herself and others. This accomplished debut is graceful and urgent, with a one-of-a-kind voice that will stay with readers long after the last page.
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“Pinto chases the elusive portrait of a mother
who simply said of herself that she was mad. As I read the novel, that also
portrays a very tender marriage and the life of a Goan family in Bombay, it
drowned me. I mean that in the best way. It plunged me into a world so vivid
and capricious that when I finished, I found something had shifted and changed
within myself. This is a world of magnified and dark emotion. The anger is a
primal force, the sadness wild and raw. Against this, the jokes are hilarious,
reckless, free falling…This is a rare, brilliant book, one that is wonderfully
different from any other that I have read coming out of India.”
—
Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss, winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award