Read
Mukherjee’s latest novel takes subtle aim at the solipsistic insularity of privileged western life. In the first part a publisher is so consumed by the climate crisis he rations water use and secretly uses his children’s education fund (accumulated by his wealthier husband) to fund an environmental charity. In the second, a woman is motivated, after a bizarre hit and run, to write the life story of her taxi driver, an undocumented Eritrean whose brother badly needs a kidney transplant. In the third, a western economic experiment sees an impoverished Indian family given a cow, with tragi-comic results. All three loosely connected parts are underpinned by a slippery exploration of the chasm between intention and consequence, and the ways in which fiction itself is often deployed to conceal rather than expose the truth. Slyly brilliant.