The Body Myth, Rheea Mukherjee
The Body Myth, Rheea Mukherjee
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The Body Myth
A Novel

Author: Rheea Mukherjee

Narrator: Soneela Nankani

Unabridged: 7 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/26/2019

Synopsis

Mira is a teacher living in the heart of Suryam, a modern, bustling city in India and the only place in the world the fickle Rasagura fruit grows. Mira lives alone and with only the French existentialists as companions, until the day she witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in the park. Mira runs to help her but is cautious, for she could have sworn the woman looked around to see if anyone was watching right before the seizure began.Mira is quickly drawn into the lives of this mysterious woman, Sara, who suffers myriad unexplained illnesses, and her kind, intensely supportive husband, Rahil, striking up intimate, volatile, and fragile friendships with each of them that quickly become something more.Intoxicated by their attention and eager to unravel the mystery of Sara’s illness, Mira wonders if Sara is unwell. Is she faking it for attention? Is it a psychological disorder? Or is Rahil making Sara sick to keep her wings clipped?A moving exploration of loss, Mukherjee delivers an intense and unexpected modern love story as Mira reconciles reality with desire.

About Rheea Mukherjee

Rheea Mukherjee received her MFA degree from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her fiction and nonfiction has been published in several publications including Scroll.in, Southern Humanities Review, Out of Print, QLRS, and Bengal Lights, among others. Her first book, a collection of short stories about contemporary urban life in India titled Transit for Beginners, was published in Asia in 2016. Her previous stories have been Pushcart nominees, Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Finalists, and semifinalists for the Black Lawrence Press Award. She spent her childhood in the United States and her teens in India and returned to the United States for college and her MFA, before returning to Bangalore, India. She cofounded Bangalore Writers Workshop in 2012 and co-runs Write Leela Write, a design and content laboratory in Bangalore.

About Soneela Nankani

Soneela Nankani is an award-winning narrator with over three hundred titles in many different genres including Young Adult, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, and Nonfiction. She has garnered sixteen Earphones Awards, nominations for Audie and SOVAS awards, and was recently awarded AudioFile magazine’s Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Honor. Her audiobooks have been featured in Best Audiobooks lists by AudioFile magazine and the Washington Post, among others. In her spare time, she loves to read (yes, really), learn languages, try new recipes, and travel. She lives in the DC area with her husband and two mischievous daughters.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Reading_

The plot is a mess. But it pulled me in successfully in this mess with its engaging writing style. The characters are too messed up. Their lives so messed up that there's no coming back out of this tangled mess. This read is an adult contemporary dealing with adult relationships, grief and mental health......more

Goodreads review by luce (cry baby)

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | | “Perhaps they had done this before. Perhaps somewhere in this house were the remains of a broken heart, another widow who fell for their charms only to have her spirit shattered.” One word: Weird. And not necessarily a good kind of weird. This short novel strikes me as......more

Goodreads review by Tanuj

The philosophy-quoting, polyamory-ok Mira (the narrator) dazzles us with her dalliances, deliberations, segues, insights. Mira's irreverent idiom reminds us of narrators created by Carmen Maria Machado and Otessa Moshfegh. It feels strange, then, that the resolution that the novel provides Mira prio......more

Quotes

“Mukherjee’s novel encapsulates the heady breathlessness of falling in love.” Publishers Weekly

“Explores the boundaries of socially acceptable romantic love.” Booklist

“Witty, melancholic, and dramatic…A touching love story about misfits searching for togetherness, even if that togetherness might not be healthy for all concerned.” Foreword Reviews

“Soneela Nankani is the consummate choice to narrate this female-centered South Asian novel. She demonstrates her range of experience as she delivers the story of a perplexing love triangle in modern India…Nankani infuses Mira with a thoughtful sweetness…Drawn in by Nankani’s deep, warm voice, we ruminate with her as she lingers over the quotes of the existential writers she loves. Nankani also expertly builds the suspense of what is wrong with Sara—is it an illness or is Rahil not the supportive husband he appears to be?” AudioFile

“Like the Rasagura fruit Rheea Mukherjee so eloquently writes about, The Body Myth is a tender love story at its core: sweet, sour, and bursting with wisdom. An intoxicating read.” Neel Patel, author of If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi

“Rheea Mukherjee has written a thought-provoking and memorable meditation on the meaning of life. In seductive prose, The Body Myth explores the depths and boundaries of relationships, conventional and unconventional, and the meaning of intimacy in sickness and health. A fine novel.” Soniah Kamal, award-winning author of Unmarriageable: Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan

Awards

  • BuzzFeed Books Pick
  • Huffington Post Pick
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