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ABOUT THE BOOK

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Physical Education Department of the Delhi school system lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his little granddaughter. Bumbling, ironical, sad, Ram is also a man corroded by a guilty secret. When Rajiv Gandhi, the soon-to-be Prime Minister, is murdered, the country is plunged into confusion and Ram, as his department's resident bribe collector, is trapped in a series of escalating, possibly deadly political betrayals. While he tries to protect himself and his family, his daughter reveals a crime that he had hoped would be buried forever. Ram's struggle to survive, and to make amends after a life of deception, thrusts him among gangsters and movie stars, into riots and morgues. An Obedient Father takes the reader to a world that is both far away and as real as the headlines or the house across the street and into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, and morally ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky's antiheroes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Akhil Sharma was born in Delhi, India in 1971. He grew up in Edison, New Jersey, U.S. His stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Quarterly and Fiction. He lives in Manhattan and is an investment banker. An Obedient Father is his first novel.

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