Synopses & Reviews
Spanning two centuries and three continents, from famine-stricken Ireland to colonial India to modern-day upstate New York,
No Country is a riveting, enchanting melting pot of a story about history, family, fate, and the enduring ties of friendship.
In rural Ireland in 1843, Padraig Aherne leaves behind his best friend, Brendan, and girlfriend, Brigid, and sets off to Dublin to rally for his country’s independence, unaware that Brigid is pregnant with his child. But once he reaches the big city, a dangerous mistake forces him on a ship destined for Calcutta. As the potato famine devastates their home, Brendan escapes with Padraig’s young daughter across the ocean, aboard one of the infamous “coffin ships” headed for America. As two family trees expand, moving towards a disastrous convergence from opposite sides of the world, Padraig’s descendants struggle to define themselves and find their places in the world. From Padraig’s reckless mother, to his precocious daughter Maeve who grows up to run a farm in Vermont, to Robert, a young policeman in British-era Calcutta who grapples with his mixed-blood heritage as an Anglo-Indian, to Billy Swint, a boy driven blind by his anger at his father, these are profoundly sympathetic women and men who transcend their eras and set up home in our hearts.
Unfurling against the fickle backdrop of history that includes terrorism on the Indian subcontinent, an East European pogrom, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, and the terrible intimacy of a murder in a sleepy New England town, the repercussions of the lives torn apart in No Country will echo through the generations to come. This is a sprawling, ambitious, and endlessly satisfying read about love and its betrayals, hardship, family, and belonging…and how all history is ultimately deeply personal.
Review
In No Country, anambitious, fascinating and suspenseful novel that spans continents andgenerations, Kalyan Ray deftly draws the reader into the lives of an unusualcast of characters who inhabit worlds as diverse as 19th century rural Ireland, colonial India and present day New York. Ray has painted these characters witha loving intricacy that made me truly care about their hopes, dreams, andtragic reversals of fate.
Review
This beautifully written, intelligent novel probes the nature of family, nation, and home—of the loyalties and allegiances which comprise identity itself. Beginning in a poor Irish village in 1843 and ending in upstate New York in 1989 by way of India, the story spans many generations and three continents to weave a panoramic tapestry, the very fabric of how we are all connected. This is a moving and compelling tale, full of richly satisfying ironies, and driven by a near-cosmic grasp of how fate and free will play out through our lives.
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An unforgettable journey through lives, continents, and history, No Country leaves you deeply moved. Kalyan Ray shows both the thrill and trauma of immigration in a true and powerful way. A wonderful book.
Review
Told from multiple perspectives, this thoughtful novel offers a panoramic view of the way personal and national destinies collide, sometimes ending in tragedy, sometimes in triumph. Historical fiction fans will find much to savor in this rich portrait of the trials and tribulations of immigrants.
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[W]renching... This compelling tale of cultural interconnectedness is highly recommended.
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"[A] compelling answer to a primal question: where do I come from?... Readers fond of Salman Rushdie’s subcontinental epics should appreciate Ray’s combination of multigenerational saga and historical canvas, taking in the potato famine, the partition of India, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Ray vividly illustrates the sentiment one of his characters puts down in a letter: '“We all stand at the same great isthmus in the geography of time. We are all related: Our mortality is our one common nation.'"
Review
This sprawling novel gives new, multilayered meaning to that old cliché, “It's a small world.” Ray’s American debut is all about connections—and disconnections.... The variegated colors, tastes and textures of Ray’s narrative, as it moves through multiple points of view, lends a powerful sense of context to both the most trivial and the most tragic of human circumstances. Ray treads the fine line between coincidence and contrivance with bravado and finesse.
Review
“No Country is a rousing adventure made up out of the blood and guts and dreams of people on three continents and nearly 150 years of troubled history.... Kalyan Ray doesn't just think about these matters splashed across three continents, he sharply dramatized them, avoiding kitsch and stock situations, embracing disparate stories to create an epic flow of tribute,celebration and commemoration, making a novel as easy to read as the latest bestseller, with a watermark that announces intelligence and fine prose at your fingertips.”
Review
“[No Country] is ambitious … [Ray’s] careful research shows on the page, with special focus on the social and cultural forces at work during the periods of time he describes. [He] depicts periods of poverty and struggle in Ireland, India and America … with special care.”
Review
“[Ray’s] elegant prose, clear relating of history and insights into people put this multi-generational novel in the same strata as Israel Singer’s "The Brothers Ashkenazi." I have no higher praise; until now, that was the best of this genre I had read.”
Review
“Ray’s vision in No Country is wonderful and poignant.… At its most powerful, No Country offers the idea that everyone you meet is kindred already—united if not by hidden roots, than at least by the kinship of merely being human. And as it works to invalidate the idea of any kind of boundary or identifying label, it creates a tragic, poetic vision of lost brothers, missing children, and lovers parted.”
About the Author
Kalyan Ray's family was uprooted from what later became Bangladesh. Educated in India and the US, he is the author of the novel Eastwords and has translated several books of contemporary Indian poetry into English. He has lived and taught in several countries on four continents, and currently divides his time between the USA and India with his wife, the Indian film director and actress Aparna Sen.