Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid reader. Today our guest is Akhil Sharma, author of A Life Of Adventure and Delight, just released by Norton this month.

Akhil’s first novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, for which I interviewed him a couple of years ago, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing MFA program at Rutgers.

A Life Of Adventure and Delight as David Sedaris says is a book filled with duality. We meet characters that burn us to the heart and those that make us want to laugh out loud. Some we take an immediate dislike to and others we wish we could emulate. But each projects a longing for something, a different way of life, love, or perhaps a life of adventure and delight. All goals we all can identify with.

What is different about this book is that we are encountering from across two oceans, characters that are like us yet whose history, religion and culture make us so different from them. And it is the differences that allow us to see more clearly, almost like gravitational lensing, the similarities that flow beneath the skin throughout all races and all cultures.