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Set during the 1990s in an overcrowded and politically corrupt Bombay, Rohinton Mistry's
Family Matters depicts a family being torn apart by lies, love, and its unresolved demons of the past. Nariman Vakeel is an aging patriarch whose advancing Parkinson's disease and its related complications threaten to destroy his large Parsi family. When Nariman breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden, his two stepchildren turn his care over to their half-sister, Roxanne, who lives in a two-room flat with her husband and two sons. What follows is each character's reaction to this situation, from Roxanne's husband's struggle to provide for his family without neglecting his conscience to their sons' coming of age in an era of uncertainty. Expertly interspersed between these dilemmas are Nariman's tortured remembrances of a forbidden love and its inescapable consequences ("no matter where you go in the world, there is only one story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different").
Family Matters is a compelling, emotional, and persuasive testimony to the importance of memories in every family's history. In a poetic style rich with detail, Mistry creates a world where fate dances with free will, and the results are often more familiar than anyone would ever care to admit. --Gisele Toueg
Book Description
The much anticipated new novel by the author of the highly praised and award-winning A Fine Balance, Family Matters is a novel of familial pride,love, and obligation. Set in Bombay in the 1990's, it defines the merging of personal and political corruption, the power of memory to keep truth alive, and the ultimate peril of memory denied. This is the story of a family in Bombay whose patriarch is ailing and needs constant care from his step-daughter. He lives under her thumb, except for his evening strolls. And, when he has an accident on an outing, her desire to pass him to her younger sister's house starts a chain of destruction that may never be repaired.
