The month of June kicks off Reading the World. As part of this project, the NBCC has asked writers from around the globe to recommend a book from beyond these shores. We asked novelist Akhil Sharma, author of “An Obedient Father” what he had to recommend. Here is what he said:
“In my opinion the best Indian writer writing in English is Upamanyu Chatterjee. His novel, English August, is now available in the US through the New York Review of Books and is the comic story of a lazy junior civil servant who spends his time masturbating, smoking pot and wondering how he ended up with his job. The book is a stylistic masterpiece in the spirit of the Jeeves novels in that very little is made to go a long way.”