Description

Bedi and Sushma’s marriage is arranged. When they first meet, they stumble through a faltering conversation about happiness and hope and agree to go in search of these things together. But even after their children Selena, Tara and Rohan are grown up and have their own families, Bedi and Sushma are still searching.

Years later, the siblings attempt to navigate life without their parents. As they travel to the Ganges to unite their father’s ashes with the opaque water, it becomes clear that each of them has inherited the same desire to understand what makes a life happy, the same confusion about this question and the same enduring hope.

A Person is a Prayer plumbs the depths of the spaces between family members and the silence that rushes in like a flood when communication deteriorates. It is about how short a life is and how the choices we make can ripple down generations.

Publisher Review

Equal parts funny and touching… A multigenerational story reflecting on the transient connections between generations across time and place, and the nature of home and memory * GQ (Best Books of 2024) * Soulful, funny and daring… A Person is a Prayer is a plaintive and refreshing take on a cross-generational saga… From the bursting white rapids of the Ganges, to the nail-rapping table tops of a Hounslow kitchen, Kalia proves himself a transportive and stylish novelist, sensitive to the precious, emotional tissues that bind a family unit, and just how easily these can disintegrate when put under inspection — Vogue (Best Books of 2024) Kalia’s debut is a moving and often very funny portrait of a family in transit – both physically and emotionally * Dazed (10 exciting books to look out for in 2024) * A moving family drama that explores migration, inheritance and loss * i-D (Fiction to be excited for in 2024) * A Person is a Prayer moved me so deeply, it’s filled with so much feeling you will not be able to stop thinking about it — Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak