The City Son - Softcover

Praise for The City Son

"Fearless . . . There's an eerie element of black magic in Didi's Svengali-like manipulation that evokes the domestic horror novels of Shirley Jackson. This superb book stages an intensely powerful showdown."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Reading Samrat Upadhyay's disturbing new novel, The City Son, is the literary equivalent of watching a horror film. His style is assured and unadorned. The occasional metaphor, such as 'this dead blackbird inside her, ' arrives to arresting effect. Upadhyay leaves us holding our breaths."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"[The City Son] examines the vengeance of a truly evil woman scorned . . . Not for the faint of heart."
--Booklist

"Upadhyay tells his story with simple and direct prose . . . The multi-character narration adds dramatic depth."
--Publishers Weekly

Praise for Samrat Upadhyay

"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. Samrat Upadhyay has created a remarkable work, one to be savored and remembered."
--Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

"Upadhyay has masterfully blended history, tragedy, politics and romance to create the arresting story of a family that is at once unique and universal, set against the backdrop of a vibrant, complicated, modern Nepal that will fascinate readers."
--Chitra Divakaruni, author of One Amazing Thing and Palace of Illusion

"Subtle and spiritually complex . . . Mr. Upadhyay's stories bring us into contact with a world that is somehow both far away and very familiar."
--The New York Times

"The Guru of Love effectively weaves together the complicated dichotomies of man and mistress, love and lust, tradition and modernity."
--USA Today

"Reads like a graceful, page-turning mixture of stirring romance and social commentary."
--Entertainment Weekly

"[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

"A triumph, a ravishingly seductive novel."
--Elle

"[Upadhyay is] among the smoothest and most noiseless of contemporary writers"
-The Los Angeles Times

"[Upadhyay's] stories have been burnished until they glow with visual and emotional precision."
-Washington Post Book World

"Highly entertaining . . . a major writer-in-the-making."
-The Indiana Express

"In an assured and subtle manner, Upadhyay anchors small yet potent epiphanies in a place called Kathmandu, and quietly calls it home."
-Publishers Weekly

Set in Samrat Upadhyay’s signature and timeless Nepal, The City Son offers a vivid portrait of a scorned woman’s lifelong obsession with revenge and the devastating ramifications for an impressionable young man.

Acclaimed and award-winning author Samrat Upadhyay—the first Nepali-born novelist writing in English to be published in the West—has crafted a spare, understated work examining a taboo subject: a wife’s obsession with her husband’s illegitimate son. When Didi discovers that her husband, the Masterji, has been hiding his beautiful lover and their young son, Tarun, in a nearby city, she takes the Masterji back into her grasp and expels his second family. Tarun’s mother, heartsick and devastated, slowly begins to lose her mind, and Tarun turns to Didi for the mothering he longs for. But as Tarun gets older, Didi’s domination of the boy turns from the emotional to the physical, and the damages she inflicts spiral outward, threatening to destroy Tarun’s one chance at true happiness. Potent, disturbing, and gorgeously stark in its execution, The City Son is a novel not soon forgotten.
From the Hardcover edition.