Lavanya Sankaran
With humor, intelligence, and masterly prose, Lavanya Sankaranâ€™s debut novel brilliantly captures the vitality and danger of a newly industrialized city and how it shapes the dreams and aspirations of two very different families., Â , Anand is a Bangalore success story: successful, well married, rich. At least, thatâ€™s how he appears. But if his little factory is to grow, he needs land and money, and, in the New India, neither of these is easy to find., Â , Kamala, Anandâ€™s familyâ€™s maid, lives perilously close to the edge of disaster. She and her clever teenage son have almost nothing, and their small hopes for self-betterment depend on the contentment of Anandâ€™s wife: a woman to whom whims come easily., Â , But Kamalaâ€™s son keeps bad company, and Anandâ€™s marriage is in trouble. The murky world where crime and land and politics meet is a dangerous place for a good man, particularly one on whom the well-being of so many depends., Â , Rich with irony and compassion, Lavanya Sankaranâ€™s ,The Hope Factory, affirms her gifts as a born storyteller with remarkable prowess, originality, and wisdom., Â ,Praise for Lavanya Sankaranâ€™s ,The Red Carpet,Â , â€œBy the end of [the] very first story, people half a world away have been transformed into complete human beings, full of frailties and fragile self-regard, achingly sympathetic. Thatâ€™s why ,The Red Carpet, reads like a revelation. . . . I recommend this book so highly!â€â€”Carolyn See, ,The Washington Post, Â , â€œThroughout these fine, articulate stories, Lavanya Sankaran brings to life the new and old social worlds of Bangalore. More important, she uses the quiet dignity of her characters to reveal whatâ€™s universal in the wide rift between generations. Itâ€™s an unusually elegant and nuanced portrait.â€â€”John Dalton, author of ,The Inverted Forest, Â , â€œItâ€™s a pity there arenâ€™t more stories to be told in ,Carpet,. Theyâ€™re so much fun.â€,â€”The Dallas Morning News,Â , â€œ[An] animated debut . . . [These stories] are memorable for their subtle wit and convincing evocation of a dynamic world.â€,â€”Publishers Weekly
Fiction,Cultural,India,Literary Fiction,Asian Literature,Indian Literature,Modern,Contemporary,Cultural,Asia,Adult Fiction,Family
The Hope Factory