About Book
The Lovers is about a man in search of a love story. This man, our narrator, is Kailash—a new immigrant, eager to shine. His friends teasingly call him Kalashnikov and sometimes AK-47, even AK. In his account of his years at a university in New York, AK takes us through the bittersweet arc of youth and love. There is discovery and disappointment. There are the brilliant women, Jennifer and Nina and Cai Yan. There is the political texture of campus life and the charismatic professor overseeing these young men and women, Ehsaan Ali (modelled on the real-life Eqbal Ahmad). Manifest in AK’s first years and first loves is the wild enthusiasm of youth, its idealism, chaotic desires and confusions.
A decidedly modern novel that melds story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, fragment and essay, The Lovers reminds us of the works of John Berger and Teju Cole. Funny, meditative and shot through with waves of longing, the book explores feelings of discomfort about cultural misunderstandings and the lack of clarity between men and women. At heart though, it is an investigation of love—‘love despite, or in spite of; love beyond and across dividing lines’.
About Author
Amitava Kumar is the author of A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna; Home Products, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize; and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which the New York Times described as a ‘perceptive and soulful...meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions’, and received the Page Turner Award. Kumar’s writing has appeared in Caravan, Harper’s, The Guardian, New Yorker, Vanity Fair and the New York Times. His essay ‘Pyre’, first published in Granta, was selected by Jonathan Franzen for Best American Essays 2016. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Kumar is Professor of English at Vassar College.