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Family Matters
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About the Book
As Christina Nunez wrote in Atlantic, “[Mistry] has long been recognized as one of the best Indian writers; he ought to be considered simply one of the best writers, Indian or otherwise, now alive.” Twice short-listed for England’s prestigious Booker Prize, Rohinton Mistry was broadly introduced to American readers when A Fine Balance was an Oprah Book Club selection in 2001.
Rohinton Mistry has not lived in his native India for many years; but like many expatriate writers, he continues a relationship with his country in his writings and has enriched his readers’ understanding of it. After emigrating to Toronto in 1975, Rohinton Mistry got a job as a bank clerk and ascended to the supervisor of customer service after a few years.
His dissatisfaction in the job led to his taking classes in English, first at York College, and ultimately pursuing a degree part-time at the University of Toronto.
Rohinton Mistry had no ambitions to be a writer until he got to Canada and began taking classes in literature at the University of Toronto. Encouraged by his wife, he set out to win a university literary contest by writing his first short story. He called in sick from work, devoted several days to the story, entered it, and won the contest.
The setting of Family Matters is Bombay, mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson´s disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small, discordant family. In a building called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren - Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild mannered and acquiescent - occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as rapidly as Nariman´s disease. Coomy has "rules to govern every aspect of [Nariman´s] shrunken life," but even she cannot keep him from his evening walks. When he stumbles and breaks an ankle (fulfilling one of Coomy´s nagging prophecies), she has hardly said "I told you so" before she is plotting to turn his round-the-clock care over to her younger, sweet-tempered half sister. Roxana, her husband, and their two sons live in an already overcrowded apartment, but Coomy knows that Roxana will not refuse her. What Coomy cannot know is that she has set in motion a great unraveling (and an unexpected repair) of the family - and a revelation of its deeply love-torn past.
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