I loved this book. The five tales that make up the novel are both thematically linked - inequality and injustice in Indian life, alienation, belonging - and also directly linked - often through what seem like background characters in the stories. There is humour and tragedy in almost equal measure although both a times risk smothering their stories. In the end, i was left wanting more, not less, so it was a success.

I was really involved with this book which captured my imagination and I found it also extremely moving. It followed the stories of different characters and explored many themes including migration, displacement, identity and loyalty. It was very well written and I was happy to recommend it to my Book Reading Group. It was highly commended and I thank Net Galley for a preview.

I read Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others back in 2014, and when I saw his name pop up on Netgalley I remembered how much I had enjoyed his writing style as well as his sharp observations of human behavior. But still I wasn't prepared for the beauty and heartbreak that awaited me in A State of Freedom. Thanks to Chatto & Windus and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

At first glance the five stories in A State of Freedom seem to have been put together at random, sharing nothing except all being placed in India. However, as one works his way through each story, comes to care for or puzzle at each character, one starts to see how all of their stories are interlinked, how one's actions affect the other, how each character's struggle is in a way representative of the other's struggle as well. The novel is prefaced by a quote from a Syrian refugee at the border of Austria, August 2015:

'Migrants? We are not migrants! We are ghosts, what's what we are, ghosts.'
Throughout the stories in A State of Freedom Mukherjee explores the stories of people who seem like ghosts, who live on the periphery, who can look in but not partake, or who are desperately struggling for a freedom they can't quite explain. If you could ask these characters what it is they want, I dont know if they'd be able to tell you. But they burn with a desire to live fully, to be completely, to take up space and be recognised. Not all characters in A State of Freedom are pleasant, but in each you can't help but recognise that spark of desire for freedom. And it is what makes these characters so recognisable and heartbreaking in the end.



Mukherjee tells five different stories in A State of Freedom, each strangely linked to the others and yet wholly independent. In the first story a father takes his son on a trip back to India from America, only to feel continuously haunted by his own weakening connection to his homeland and his son's seeming non-interest. In the second story a young man visits his parents in India while working on a cook book and gets to know the family's cook, a woman who works quietly and hard, with a whole story just waiting to be told. Class, pride, generational differences, it all comes to the surface in this story. The third story is perhaps the most difficult in A State of Freedom, in that its protagonist is not exactly likeable and yet you can't despise him. He finds a bear cub and hopes that by viciously training it he will be able to win both an emotional as well as financial freedom. In the fourth story we follow a woman from childhood to adulthood as she is moved around to work as a maid here or there, stripped of independence until she manages to claw as much of it back as she can. Interspersed with her story is that of her childhood friend who joined a Communist militant group in the hopes to change something, do something. The fifth and last story is perhaps the most heartbreaking, told without punctuation in a rambling stream of consciousness style. In this final story the follow a man who moved to the city to earn money for his family as his mind wanders, lost. This story is close to painful to read in its hopelessness and tragedy.



I have tried to describe the stories in A State of Freedom above as clearly yet non-spoilery as is possible, yet I don't know if I'll be able to find the words to explain just how heartbreaking some of them are. Mukherjee doesn't spare his readers and forces them to look upon his characters, his country, as clearly as he does. With unflinching but beautiful prose, Mukherjee describes the wonder of India's nature, the sumptuousness of its food, the harshness of its poverty, the brutality of its division between rich and poor, the pride and resilience of its people. In a way A State of Freedom is an ode to freedom, an encouraging cry to all of us who struggle day by day to reach some kind of state of freedom. And yet it is also a harsh reminder of just how far many of us are removed from finding that freedom, from being free in any sense of the word, from worry, financial burden, shame, oppression. A State of Freedom isn't a fun read, but it is one that will leave a beautiful ache once it's finished.

There were times this collection made me want to cry, but there were also times when it filled me with hope. Mukherjee's five stories are horribly beautiful and stunningly sad, and I wholeheartedly recommend you read them. A State of Freedom will stick with me for a very long time.

This is a fascinating, involving book which really captured my imagination as well as moved me emotionally. Following the apparently disparate stories of a range of characters, it explored many themes including displacement, identity, migration and loyalty. Beautifully written and truly original.

Rich indeed in characterisations and the author keeps track of ongoing relationships and people. We stay close to his ancestral home and never go to his western abode except he refers to it - but these are a collection of events in his mother's house in. Calcutta, mostly focused on cooking and cultural reasons for choice of elements - really ingenious and gripping. Makes me feel closer to Indian experience which is normally, for me, shrouded in cliche. The class divide, and snobbishness about food etc. All go into making it accessible and entertaining. Unusual ..

Mukherjee's novel provides a fascinating insight into how family members are forced to leave their remote rural homes in India to find work in the cities. The expectation, universally held, being that they shall become rich and be able to send money home. Reality, as this series of cameos portrays, is very different. Mukherjee fortunately provides us with some charming anecdotes to contrast with his brutally frank descriptions of city slums and the cruel treatment meted out to those who migrate there in search of work. If it's happy endings you look for in your reading "A State of Freedom" is not for you, but if you want to improve your understanding of the mismatch between seeking and acquiring freedom add this book to your shelf.

Well written but heartbreaking as the book describes the plight of those who would love to better themselves, but are restricted by poverty, lack of opportunity and the social system in India.

Neel Mukherjee is one of the most vital, interesting and original voices in fiction at the moment, and A State of Freedom is a consistently engaging and thought-provoking examination of the ways we interact and tessellate, how we see ourselves and how others view us. His ear for dialogue is matched by a unerring eye for detail, and for deep psychological acuity. His prose continues to burn, to shine and to surprise - and provide a reading experience unlike others. Highly recommended.

I began reading this novel last week when a Guardian review tipped it as a Booker Prize contender. In the end it didn't make a fiercely competitive longlist and I can kind of see why. But in spite of some minor flaws, there is a lot to like about it.

The book is a collection of five interconnected tales, all set in present day India. In the first, a US-based lecturer returns to his homeland with his six-year-old son and experiences a growing sense of unease as they explore various tourist attractions. The next story focuses on a London publisher who spends time with his parents in Bombay every year. He becomes friendly with the family servants and takes up an invitation to visit one of their homes, but soon begins to regret this decision. The middle story is the longest and it tells of a abusive man's attempts to train a bear cub to dance, in order to perform on the streets for money. The fourth tale examines the fortunes of two young girls in a remote village, who end up taking very different paths. And the last section is a short stream of consciousness from a troubled construction worker.

What is striking about all of the stories is the presence of extreme poverty. Many of these characters live in filthy, overcrowded slums and struggle to simply stay alive. Food has a big part to play in the book: the middle class are preoccupied with deciding what their underpaid cooks will prepare for their dinner, while the poorer families constantly worry about where their next meal will come from. The impoverished adults take on several jobs and their daughters abandon school early in life to work as maids in big houses. It all paints a very divided picture of modern India.

I felt like I had read first story before, and the last one didn't work for me - it seemed tacked on and unfinished. But the middle three sections were undoubtedly compelling: they depict the resilience of some fascinating characters and their attempts to make a life for themselves in the face of overwhelming adversity. In these unflinching tales, Neel Mukherjee displays a deep understanding of the inequality and exploitation of Indian society. When it shines, A State of Freedom is a powerful and vivid portrait of a complicated country.

Set in modern-day India, this powerful and sometimes chilling novel is structured in 5 sections, each one relating the story of a different character. Each section is complete in itself but their lives sometimes intersect. What definitely links the characters is that each is searching for a better life, looking for an escape, sometimes voluntarily or sometimes when it is forced upon them. All of them are lost or adrift, even the more privileged amongst them, and the book is a particularly unflinching examination of the lives of India’s poor, who are often displaced, faced with violence and suffer pain and injustice. This is a bleak book indeed, with very little hope for these characters who are so vividly drawn that they engage the reader’s sympathies throughout. The detail of their daily lives, the descriptions of both town and country, the hopelessness and helplessness of it all make for some harrowing but nevertheless totally compelling reading. These are characters who will long remain with me.

This novel is an insightful, heart-wrenching yet clear-eyed story of survival in rural and urban India. Neel Mukherjee is a master at creating fully rounded characters who are flawed, real and engaging. This is a short novel which links various stories together from characters with tangential links to each other, they flow easily from each other although occupying different parts of the country and different periods of time. Whether it is a young girl of 8 years working in domestic servitude or an old man eking out a living as a bear-wallah, the author gives them a quiet resilience and fortitude against fate.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK, Vintage Publishing for a review copy.

This is a good read for all those wanting an insight into modern India. Comprising three stories all vastly different but all dealing very much with what happens on a daily basis in modern times.

We have a domestic cook and a cleaner in a middle class flat in Mumbai. The son returned from London on vacation and one who finds the class divisions difficult to accept, but you do not make waves when you are only at home one month every year! He is keen to know what goes on in their lives, what makes them tick to the consternation of his mother and disdain of his father. The two classes do not mix and sadly this remains so even in my part of the world. I must say there are reasons for this some good, some not so but that is the way of the world.

We then have a man with a dancing bear and this was something I found very very hard to read about. We have dancing monkeys in my part of the world and I hate that the government is not doing enough to stop this practice. It has almost died out but we still have them. Right now everyone here is on a rant about elephants and I do hope it succeeds. This bit about the bear was very difficult for me to get through.

The third story was a very good one - of a girl who escapes biting poverty to join a rebel movement to try to obtain justice and an alleviation of poverty for her family in someway because normal ways do not work. This was a hard hitting story and one that is relevant very much today in many many countries. The story was a sad one, one that was not going to end well but it was a realistic one.

Different social situations, different people, mainly dealing with the poor who are all trying to make a better life for themselves. Not a very comfortable read but a book that would make you think and be also happy that you are where you are, living the way you do live. It certainly made me think of being fortunate to live in Sri Lanka.

Goodreads and Amazon review up on 22/7/2017. Review on my blog early November 2017. Also linked to my FB page.

Five essays in the form of novellas make up this novel about the desire for a better life. Each loosely connected story is rife with despair, violence, abuse and corruption. Modern India is on show, warts and all, and it doesn’t come out too great. Mukherjee manages to humanise the poor, highlight the hypocrisies of the middle classes, and throw shade at the unashamed misconduct of the authorities - a bribe here, a bribe there, a bribe everywhere. Some of the writing is great, especially when Mukherjee writes about family duty. ‘Raja-da said, ‘We brothers went to our village pathshala, we didn’t have much education. I was determined to send my boys to school. I want them to have a different life, a better life. This life of a farmer, cultivating rice, growing a few vegetables… it’s a difficult one. We struggle. Our days are not easy. I don’t want this for my boys.’’ But I found the breathless description of cooking methods and different buildings exhausting by the end. Besides Milly, the maidservant, and Soni, the village-girl turned Maoist guerrilla, I found the characters, for the most part, unsympathetic. This, therefore, made the novel a difficult read, and although I would recommend this book to a friend, I would first direct them to something like the ‘The Year of the Runaways,’ which manages to paint Modern India in just a brutally honest light, but has characters you grow to love and root for. I'd give A State of Freedom 3 and a half stars if I could.

Through a series of seemingly unrelated stories, A State of Freedom paints a complex picture of an India in flux, with its great divide between rich and poor. On one side are the owners of luxury apartments, employing servants to cook and clean, and security guards to keep out the uninvited; on the other, not only those cooks, cleaners, and guards, but their even poorer relatives, left behind in isolated rural communities, living hand to mouth, with no financial safety net for illness or a ruined crop, often dependent on any money that can be sent home by those you've left.
At first we see India through the eyes of comparative 'outsiders', ie Indians living abroad - an American academic and his small son visiting historic sites, a young man returning home for his annual visit, at odds with his parents and their attitudes - then move on to those still 'trapped' by India. And 'trapped' does seem to be the appropriate word here - the caste system may no longer exist but people are still limited in every way by the circumstances of their birth, which for the majority is into a life of grinding poverty. The well-meaning outsider may try to understand their lives, but without having lived them, it's a gap almost impossible to bridge.

Attempting to leave that poverty behind is the great desire that fuels everyone's life, whether through joining guerrilla forces fighting for equality, trying to make a break for freedom as a wandering entertainer with a dancing bear, or moving to the city where there's work to be had supporting the lifestyles of the wealthy. The lucky find a relatively stable job, but still choose to live as cheaply as possible in appalling conditions, sending money home to their families who are worse off, or to finance their children's future.
Plans, savings, dreams can disappear overnight and yet, maybe because there's no other choice, people carry on - strive to find a better job, save to put their children through school or university - and for a lucky few the dream comes true - not quite the Slumdog Millionaire fantasy, but a boy from a poor farming family can win scholarships, and, supported by the selfless devotion of a family member, find himself at university in Europe.


From the safety of our comfortable lives, this isn't always an easy read. The level of poverty and squalor is almost beyond our understanding, but Mukherjee gives these 'third world problems' a human face, makes us care for the individuals when we might ignore the masses caught in the same plight, and maybe it might change a few minds about people from all countries who choose to take a chance and try for a better life here.

An intriguing network of short stories set in modern India with the backdrop of traditional culture. The stories have a vague link with one another, usually focusing on one particular character's narrative. And the nature of each story varies from magical realism to politics. While there were some stories I liked more than others, the animal cruelty of one specific tale was a little gratuitous to my liking. And while I know this happens in India it didn't seem to go anywhere. Other than that a well written cyclical novel.

Neel Mukherjee may have narrowly missed out on winning the Booker Prize when his previous novel “The Lives of Others” was shortlisted in 2014, but someone ought to give this writer a crown just for writing such impactful openings in his novels. In both that book and his new novel “A State of Freedom” I was moved, surprised and totally gripped after reading the first twenty or thirty pages. The vignettes which open these novels are separate from the main plots but have the ability to capture a reader’s attention and emotionally set the tone for what’s to come. In the case of this new novel, we meet a man who returns to India after living in America for a long time with his son in tow. On their travels to tourist sites he has a conflicted sense of identity seeing his native country through Western eyes. He has feelings of guilt mixed with anxiety and disgust. Then something so surprising and eerie occurs that I became hooked. The novel goes on to describe the lives of a few different individuals whose stories connect in fascinating ways. It’s a sweeping story that makes a complex but highly readable portrait of the state of modern India, economic inequality, classism and national identity.

Although the novel deals with a lot of serious subjects and has many brutally heartrending scenes, a lot of the book is saturated by the warm sensation of cooking. In the second section, an unnamed character makes annual visits to his family in Bombay after he’s permanently settled in England. He’s writing a book about regional Indian cooking because he asserts “Indians have always known there is nothing called Indian food, only different, sometimes wildly and thrillingly different, regional cuisines. This is a fact that has been flattened out in the West.” So he develops a special interest in his parents’ Bengali cook Renu and frequently gossips with his mother about her and their maid Milly. We’re given a strong sense of the flavours of their meals and aromas like fennel, cumin, fenugreek, nigella and mustard seeds which permeate their kitchen. These descriptions are not only evocative of sensory experience but the author delineates the origins of dishes, their attachment to particular sections of society and the way recipes are passed down through generations. This character’s desire to acquire this information and neatly present it for a British audience begs questions about cultural appropriation or cultural/class tourism as he delves further into Renu’s humble origins and the slum she inhabits.

The story veers sharply when the next section describes a baby bear which emerges into a village out of the wilderness. A poor man named Lakshman burdened with caring for his family and his absent brother’s children takes possession of the bear which he names Raju. He alights upon a money-making scheme to train the bear in the tradition of some wandering ascetic Sufi dervishes who make their bears “dance” for the amusement of the public. In reality, the methods used to get these bears to “perform” requires torturous techniques and Lakshman is aware that this practice has been outlawed. Nevertheless, he and Raju set out on a journey to make their fortune. It’s a sad, poignant and tense tale as Lakshman believes he develops an emotional connection with his bear, but the reader is highly aware that the bear’s animal nature persists despite being violently tamed.

One of the biggest luxuries that divide people into different classes and levels of privilege is access to education. The novel takes a surprising turn when the next section describes the back story of the maid Milly, her impoverished childhood and conversion to Christianity. The family and many local villagers convert because they are promised “a big sack of rice. It was food for a month.” Although Milly shows a natural flair for learning and enjoys reading with a passion, her education is abruptly cut off at the age of eight when she’s forced to travel far away to work as a maid.
“‘And school?’ she [Milly] asked in a small voice. ‘Studying?’
‘Nothing doing,’ her mother replied impatiently. ‘Studying. What is that for a girl?’ You’ll be more useful bringing in some money. Now shut up.’”
Naturally, being a lover of reading this scene felt particularly heartbreaking. But it also made me inwardly cheer as Milly tries to find secret ways to continue reading in her new places of employment.

We follow the agonizing condition of Milly’s life as she works for a variety of households. Earlier this year, I read Anne Brontë’s first novel “Agnes Grey” which recounts the life of a humble governess as she works for a series of middle/upper class families. It feels like Mukherjee uses the same method here, depicting a servant in a variety of settings to both satirize the behavior of a girl’s privileged employers and expose the egregious abuse heaped upon the servant class. While Brontë’s depiction might have been scandalous at the time, Mukherjee’s is even more so now for the way he shows Milly is not only oppressed but turned into an imprisoned slave.

Running parallel with Milly’s story is that of her childhood friend Soni who suffers devastating losses due to illness. This highlights another important schism between classes of society: access to healthcare. Through emotional scenes in a rural underfunded and understaffed hospital the author powerfully depicts how “Illness was a luxury for the rich. Illness had reduced everyone here to a beggar.” Soni’s tragic circumstances prompt her to join the “People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army” – a radical Maoist armed group bent on overthrowing the government. This brushes against the Naxalite movement which Mukherjee explored so fascinatingly in “The Lives of Others.” In this story it makes a sharp contrast between the paths that Milly and Soni take in life and elucidate the central preoccupation of the novel: what choices do we really have in determining our personal freedom?

The final section, yet again, goes somewhere else entirely and demonstrates a complete stylistic change as well, but poignantly circles back to earlier story lines. It builds to a spectacular tale that prompts uncomfortable questions about the degree to which our own independence impinges upon or inhibits the freedom of others. Mukherjee excels at describing evocative details of particular places, but also movingly comments upon universal conditions such as friendship and aging: “Childhood friendships were often like that – intense in presence and in the present tense, remote and unreachable in absence.” His characters are so memorable not only because he movingly captures the arcs of their development, but lets us feel so intensely that given a twist of fate their stories might be our own.

I couldn't finish this book - it was just too horrific for me, in terms of casual violence to women and animals. The prose is excellent but I just found it too difficult to read in terms of content.

A State ofFreedom is the first book I've read by Neel Mukherjee. In summary, wow, what a story! I was totally engrossed in this dramatic and occasionally harrowing journey.

The narrative, at first, seems a little disparate; it's in five completely different sections each told from a different perspective. But there's a consistent thread of people and events which allows the author to explore numerous themes including, for example, wealth and poverty, East and West, cruelty and kindness, injustice and violence. But it's also a book about hope. He paints a huge canvas which brings so many contrasts and differences to the fore in a compelling way. There's a real feel for life in modern India. The narrative is powerful and sweeping. It's incredibly well written; use of language and narrative structure are original and the reader has what feels like genuine insights. In the first section, the sense of beggars and the poor crowding a wealthy Dr and his son who're visiting Mumbai is almost palpable. Mukherjee's writing created a real sense of heat, dust, clamour and desperation as the beggars see an opportunity. And the real interest lies in the discomfort with which the father views his former city and how he deals with a range of situations.

This is a difficult book to describe; there is a plot, but it's unconventional. It rolls along and in the central section, there's some quite harrowing detail. But stick with it because this is a book to savour and experience. I've found a few sections quite haunting, the detail still with me after finishing the book. It's a book I'll certainly read again and my thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley.

Parts one and two of this book gave some detailed insights into lives so different from mine and were a very interesting read. Unfortunately I couldn't read past the first few pages of the third and fourth tales. They were very uncomfortable and distressing reading.

A fine and constantly surprising writer, Mukherjee here focuses on the poor of India, their unimaginable life choices and options. The format is interconnected short stories, the voices both male and female, impoverished and wealthy. There's nothing complex about the tales; instead they offer simple but profound insights into individual existences representative of a teeming, unique but corrupt and grossly unequal society. Readable and revelatory, this is understatedly powerful work.