Sharma's work was his second to be
published. It won the Folio Prize in 2015 and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2016.
In Family Life, Akhil Sharma tells a story that is both intense and precise in its emotional impact. We meet the
Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, when Ajay, eight, and his older brother Birju, eight, play
cricket in the streets while waiting for their plane tickets to arrive so that they and their mother can go across the world to join their father in
America. When automatic glass doors open in front of the Mishras, they believe they've been mistaken for someone significant. When they press an elevator button, the elevator closes its doors and rises, they feel powerful since the elevator is obeying them. Life is idyllic until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother with severe brain damage and the other orphaned in an unfamiliar country. Ajay, the family's younger son, prays to a God he imagines as Superman, yearning to find his place among the rubble of his new life.
Family Life is a universal narrative of a youngster divided between responsibility and his own survival that is both heartbreaking and darkly humorous.'
