Praises for THE IMMIGRANT:
‘A truly compelling portrait of absences and silences in a marriage.’---Maggie Gee
‘’If Slumdog Millionaire left you hankering for more of the subcontinent, pick up Kapur’s fourth novel.’’---Jennifer Ryan, Image magazine
‘Towards the end of The Immigrant I was constantly looking at the diminishing pages with regret and reading a little more slowly. It’s lovely when you don’t want a book to finish and I certainly didn’t want this one to end. As I said, I loved it.’---Mavis Cheek
‘‘Hidden truths emerge to unravel their relationship in this subtle, beautifully observed portrait of ordinary lives.’’---Fanny Blake, Woman & Home
‘‘Themes of sex, identity and belonging dominate this excellent novel.’’---Rebecca Cripps, Sainsbury’s magazine
‘‘At a time when almost everyone claims to be an immigrant, it is good to read a novel about the immigrant experience by a writer who lives in her own country. The Indian writer Manju Kapur’s fourth novel gains clarity and perspective not only from its objective assessment of immigration, but also because the story is set in the 1970s. By returning to an era when to leave one’s home was to relegate it to the past, Kapur throws into contrast today’s more fluid migrant identities, hybridized by the ways in which technology, affordable airfares and sheer weight of numbers keep aspects of the old society alive in the new … The Immigrant develops into an absorbing, often surprising novel of character. Kapur’s plain style has acquired depth and resonance … [her] reconstruction of 1970s Halifax is scrupulous … the author’s grasp of the background extends beyond facts to a convincing evocation of how Canadian society feels and the beliefs Canadians often express. This is territory that has been neglected by the best-known Indo-Canadian novelists, such as Rohinton Mistry, M.G. Vassanji and Anita Rau Badami. It is perhaps unsurprising, given the Canadian publishing industry’s preoccupation with international themes, that the most complete fictional study of the adaptation of Indian immigrants to Canada should be written by a novelist who is not Canadian. The Immigrant succeeds in both its distilled insights into the mental stages through which a new immigrant passes, and its persuasive studies of character.’---Stephen Henighan, Times Literary Supplement
‘’Since her first novel … Manju Kapur has established herself as a chronicler of middle-class Indian manners, even earning comparison with Jane Austen for her sharp-eyed, finely tuned portraits of unremarkable lives … [she] carefully unravels the story of this desperate, but moving marriage. She does so without condescension and with careful attention to the couple’s mundane moments of tenderness … Kapur explores the special challenges facing immigrant wives: the way a young woman’s life, already so pressured in professional and reproductive terms, becomes an even more impossible balancing act inside a foreign culture … Convincing.’’---Ruth Scurr, Daily Telegraph
‘‘It is an enlightening portrait of an arranged marriage, and a detailed exploration of the costs and concessions involved in adjusting to both marriage and immigration.’’---Phillipa Logan, Oxford Times
‘Intensely readable … beneath its calm, melancholic surface, the novel deals with momentous themes of love and belonging.’’---Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail