No Country by Kalyan Ray

No Country by Kalyan Ray

In November 1989, an Indian couple are discovered murdered in a small town in upstate New York. They lie together as though just disengaged from a long embrace. Yet their murder has been two centuries in the making.

County Sligo, Ireland, 1843. Seventeen-year-old Brendan McCarthaigh and his best friend Padraig have everything ahead of them. Quiet Brendan is in love with books and headstrong, spirited Padraig is madly in love with black-haired Brigid. But when the sanctimonious Father Conlon discovers Padraig and Brigid’s clandestine affair, he sets in motion a chain of unforeseeable, irrevocable events that will propel one to North America and the other to Bengal.

Weaving together private histories and real events, and taking us on a journey across the globe – Kalyan Ray has crafted a sweeping, epic, multigenerational saga spanning two centuries. A rich, compelling tale of home and exile, identity and hybridity, it is also a story of oppression, friendship and compassion, and the few intimate degrees of separation that lie between love and murder.

This beautifully-written, intelligent novel probes the nature of family, nation and home - of the loyalties and allegiances which comprise identity itself … the story spans many generations and three continents to weave a panoramic tapestry, the very fabric of how we are all connectedThis is a moving and compelling tale -- Enid Shomer, author of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile
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 -- Lara Vapnyar, award-winning author of The Scent of Pine
In his beautiful voice, Ray has created characters that seem to glow out of the pages with their humanness, each voice fragile and strong at once, grappling with its own set of heartache and history … This is a book that WILL take its time and only when it’s done with you, some 50 hours later, will you emerge – dazed, bruised, stronger and irrevocably in love * Hindustan Times *
A soaring saga * Sunday Herald *
Historic events are woven ingeniously into each story, and this adds to the sharpness of the narrative … The author was educated in India and in the USA, and now lives in both countries. He has researched this story with great intimacy, and is uniquely placed to produce a multi-generational saga with triangular complexity * Irish Examiner *