From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Rahul Bhattacharya on 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma

Family LifeFamily Life is a beautiful, unsentimental and heartbreaking novel. It is a slim book of small moments but contains so much that is essential to us all: love, compulsion, cruelty, frustration; as the two components of the title have it: family and life.

It is hard to pin down where the peculiar penetration of Akhil Sharma’s writing comes from. There is the blunt-sharp voice of confessional honesty, so transparent as to feel forbidden. There are the note-perfect observations about the way we think. There is the cadence of his words. Family Life begins with the sentence, “My father has a glum nature.” Six simple words in unexpected alchemy. The word glum, often employed for comedy, has not lost its lightness. The word nature suggests a profound melancholy. And so in eight syllables we are quite deep into something. The mother, we are told on the next page, looks at things differently. “Like many people of her generation, those born before Independence, my mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic.” The narrator is a son, whose older brother suffered a terrible accident as a boy, and the book is about its debilitating effect on them all.

Sharma’s brilliant first novel, An Obedient Father, made the unpalatable if not palatable then at least confrontable. The feat of Family Life is to make the familiar feel truer than you knew. How difficult that must be to achieve.

Great finds