Description

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“A novel as easy to read as the latest bestseller, No Country is a rousing adventure made up out of the blood and guts and dreams of people on three continents and nearly 150 years of troubled history” (Alan Cheuse, NPR).

In the poverty of rural Ireland in 1843, Padraig Aherne and Brendan McCarthaigh grew up as brothers, inseparable, even when Padraig falls in love with their beautiful classmate, Brigid. But when Padraig makes a dangerous mistake that forces him onto a ship bound for India, and the deadly potato famine sweeps through their tiny village, Brendan is left alone to care for his best friend’s child, an infant daughter Padraig never knew he had. Eventually, Brendan flees with her aboard one of the infamous “coffin ships,” to begin a new life in America. As Brendan’s and Padraig’s two family trees take root on opposite sides of the world, their tendrils begin to intertwine, moving inexorably toward a disastrous convergence more than a century later.

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 fallout from lives torn apart in No Country smolders for generations.

About the Author

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Kalyan Ray's family was uprooted from what later became Bangladesh. Educated in India and the US, he is the author of the novel Eastwords and has translated several books of contemporary Indian poetry into English. He has lived and taught in several countries on four continents, and currently divides his time between the USA and India with his wife, the Indian film director and actress Aparna Sen.

Praise For…

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“No Country is a rousing adventure made up out of the blood and guts and dreams of people on three continents and nearly 150 years of troubled history.... Kalyan Ray doesn't just think about these matters splashed across three continents, he sharply dramatized them, avoiding kitsch and stock situations, embracing disparate stories to create an epic flow of tribute,celebration and commemoration, making a novel as easy to read as the latest bestseller, with a watermark that announces intelligence and fine prose at your fingertips.”
— Alan Cheuse

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