A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled.
A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled.
A Life Apart follows the highly unsentimental education of Ritwik Ghosh, a poor but clever boy from Calcutta, who wins a scholarship to study English at Oxford but overstays his visa and winds up scratching a living as an illegal farmworker and eventually as a rent boy.
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