Buddha's Orphans - Hardcover

Called “a Buddhist Chekhov” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Samrat Upadhyay’s writing has been praised by Amitav Ghosh and Suketu Mehta, and compared with the work of Akhil Sharma and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Upadhyay’s new novel, Buddha’s Orphans, uses Nepal’s political upheavals of the past century as a backdrop to the story of an orphan boy, Raja, and the girl he is fated to love, Nilu, a daughter of privilege.Their love story scandalizes both families and takes readers through time and across the globe, through the loss of and search for children, and through several generations, hinting that perhaps old bends can, in fact, be righted in future branches of a family tree.
Buddha’s Orphans is a novel permeated with the sense of how we are irreparably connected to the mothers who birthed us and of the way events of the past, even those we are ignorant of, inevitably haunt the present. But most of all it is an engrossing, unconventional love story and a seductive
and transporting read.

"Buddha's Orphans is an extraordinary achievement. It has the sweep and romantic grandeur of a great old-fashioned Russian novel, and, at the same time, the precision and intimacy of a beautiful collection of linked stories." —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

Raja and Nilu are fated to fall in love.

They have both been abandoned—he through his mother’s suicide in the public pond, she through her mother’s constant escape into drink. He has grown up on the streets, she in a crumbling mansion. And yet, they find each other, again and again: first, as children, then, as young lovers, and, finally, after they fear losing their marriage. But the events of the past, even those we are ignorant of, inevitably haunt the present. And Raja and Nilu’s story is not only their own.

Set within Nepal’s political upheavals, Buddha’s Orphans is an engrossing, unconventional love story, a seductive, transporting read, and further evidence that Samrat Upadhyay is one of our finest writers, thoroughly deserving of his acclaim as "the Buddhist Chekhov."

Praise for Samrat Upadhyay

"Upadhyay’s Kathmandu is as specific and heartfelt as Joyce’s Dublin." —San Francisco Chronicle

"[Upadhyay’s] characters linger. They are captured with such concise, illuminating precision that one begins to feel that they just might be real." —Christian Science Monitor

"Upadhyay . . . illuminat[es] the shadow corners of his characters’ psyches, as well as the complex social and political realities of life in Nepal, with equal grace." —Elle  

SAMRAT UPADHYAY is the author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, a Whiting Award winner, The Royal Ghosts, and The Guru of Love, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. Upadhyay directs the creative writing program at Indiana University.