Neel Mukherjee

Calcutta, 1967: Supratik has become dangerously involved in political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind, before disappearing, is a note. At home, his family slowly begins to unravel, and destructive secrets are unearthed.

A State of Freedom prises open the central, defining events of our century - displacement and migration - but not as you imagine them. Five characters, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more.

Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives - formally daring, fierce but full of pity - delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.