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Author Photo 2_Buku.jpg

Not Quite A Disaster After All by Buku Sarkar

$18.95

In this house filled with voices and footsteps, a time allowed and a time needed to bridge the discrepancy between who you were and who you wanted to become. Under the canopy of the day, you could see, from this distance, how shattered the world was that we lived in and how beautiful its dust.

  

In six haunting stories that span two continents and two decades, we follow Anjali, misfit, the expensively educated daughter of a wealthy family, from her childhood in Calcutta to her coming of age in New York City, claiming the grimy dive bars of the East Village as her own.

We also see her childhood friend Anita, who struggles with the quieter life, marriage, and motherhood she has chosen, in a suburb of Ohio. 

These are women who muster all their grit and resolve in order to make their way. 

 

Not Quite A Disaster After All is about how our expectations of life shift and change, how they can be pushed in the most unpredictable ways. It is about the thin line between self-destruction and survival. It is also a novel about falling in love—with a person, a city, or simply with the alluring, exciting promise of the new.

Deceptively simple and gently ironic, these nuanced stories of great depth and power mark the arrival of an outstanding voice.

In this house filled with voices and footsteps, a time allowed and a time needed to bridge the discrepancy between who you were and who you wanted to become. Under the canopy of the day, you could see, from this distance, how shattered the world was that we lived in and how beautiful its dust.

  

In six haunting stories that span two continents and two decades, we follow Anjali, misfit, the expensively educated daughter of a wealthy family, from her childhood in Calcutta to her coming of age in New York City, claiming the grimy dive bars of the East Village as her own.

We also see her childhood friend Anita, who struggles with the quieter life, marriage, and motherhood she has chosen, in a suburb of Ohio. 

These are women who muster all their grit and resolve in order to make their way. 

 

Not Quite A Disaster After All is about how our expectations of life shift and change, how they can be pushed in the most unpredictable ways. It is about the thin line between self-destruction and survival. It is also a novel about falling in love—with a person, a city, or simply with the alluring, exciting promise of the new.

Deceptively simple and gently ironic, these nuanced stories of great depth and power mark the arrival of an outstanding voice.

BUKU SARKAR is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in various magazines and journals including NYRB, n+1, Raleigh Review, Threepenny Review, The New York Times, Huffington Post and Mint Lounge. Her photographs have been exhibited at ICP in New York, Art Basel, Miami, and venues across the US and Europe and she has featured in Fleur and Arbor magazine and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. She received the Andrew Nelson Lytle Award for best short story in 2021. Her photobook Photowali Didi was published in 2022. The first screenplay she cowrote, Shameless, premiered at Cannes. Buku lives in Kolkata and New York.

 

“Sarkar’s stories are smart, kind, attentive to detail, populated with people you want to spend time with and learn more about. A major accomplishment.”

—ALEKSANDER HEMON

“Buku Sarkar knows intimately the worlds she paints with strokes of startling beauty and pain. Her men and women—and especially her children, and the haunting secrets they carry—will remain with readers for a long time.”

—CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI, author of The Last Queen and Independence

“Not Quite a Disaster After All is sparkling debut, acutely observed and stylishly rendered, about intimacy and its aftertaste. It’s also quietly, languidly funny.”

—MOHAMMED HANIF, author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes

“Each sentence in this book shimmers with a quiet luminescence. These are stories of people divided between places, old selves in new worlds. With the poetry of Sandra Cisneros and the simplicity of Jhumpa Lahiri, Buku Sarkar weaves a book about homes lost and homes we yearn.”

—BILAL TANWEER, author of The Scatter Here is Too Great