The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “Punchy, clever, and stuffed with delicious chapatis, Mira Jacob’s first novel jumps effortlessly from India to the States, creating a vibrant portrait of a world in flux.”

  — Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Little Failure

• “With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.”

  — People

• “This debut novel so fully envelops the reader in the soul of an Indian-American immigrant family that it’s heart-wrenching to part with them…Thanks to Jacob’s captivating voice, which is by turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion, her characters shimmer with life. [Grade:] A-”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “[A] sprawling, poignant, often humorous novel…Told with humor and sympathy for its characters, the book serves as a bittersweet lesson in the binding power of family, even when we seek to break out from it.”

  — O, The Oprah Magazine

• “An emotional, colorful saga about family and the Indian-American experience.”

  — Better Homes and Gardens

• “Beautifully wrought, frequently funny, gently heartbreaking…Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow, and she is remarkably adept at tonal shifts. When her plot springs surprises, she lets them happen just as they do in life: blindsidingly right in the middle of things.”

  — Boston Globe

• “A rich, engrossing debut told with lightness and care, as smart about grief as it is about the humor required to transcend it.”

  — Kansas City Star

• “Jacob’s darkly comic debut—about a photographer’s visit to her parents’ New Mexico home during a family crisis—is grounded in the specifics of the middle-class Indian immigrant experience while uncovering the universality of family dysfunction and endurance…Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable…Both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “Jacob’s emotionally bountiful debut immerses us in the lives of Amina Eapen and her extended Indian-American family…The author has a wonderful flair for recreating the messy sprawl of family life, with all its joy, sadness, frustration, and anger.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “Jacob’s writing is refreshing, and she excels at creating a powerful bond between the reader and her characters, all wonderfully drawn and with idiosyncratic natures…that make them enchanting. Recommended for those who like engaging fiction that succeeds in addressing serious issues with some humor.”

  — Library Journal

• “Jacob has written a closely observed, scrupulously detailed story of an extended family dealing with the difficulties of living in America and with each other. That the past is always present in their lives provides a dramatic tension that at once brings them together and threatens to drive them apart. Jacob has done an excellent job of balancing these elements as she has created a memorable and dramatic portrait of a family in flux.”

  — Booklist

• “The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing seizes the reader early and never lets go. Its electricities reside in Mira Jacob’s acute details and the sadness, anger, and humor of her characters. This novel tells many wonderful stories while also telling, beautifully, the story that counts the most.”

  — Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts

• “Mira Jacob has written an utterly dazzling, epic debut. The story of an Indian American family is at once completely relatable and totally fresh. A beautifully timed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is intricately woven and sparklingly played out, and it triumphs. I did not want this breathtaking book to end.”

  — Julie Klam, author of Friendkeeping