Brilliantly exploring the nature of desire and spirituality in a changing society, Arresting God in Kathmandu records the echoes of modernization in love and family. Husbands and wives bound together by arranged marriages, are driven elsewhere by the basic human desire for connection and transcendence in a city where gods are omnipresent, privacy is elusive and family defines identity. Psychologically rich and astonishingly acute, Arresting God in Kathmandu is a potent voice in contemporary fiction.
Review
'These stories break the heart and fill the mind because they are so marvelously shrewd in craft and because Mr. Upadhyay is unafraid of the harder no amount of distance can dull-not because, as exotica, they take place in a world alien to the parochial kind we are. ARRESTING God in Kathmandu is fiction that haunts as much as it instructs. Next, please turn Mr. Upadhyay loose to go hunting for God in the equally needy provinces of his new homeland.' –Lee K. Abbott.
'With a masterfull narrative style, fascinating characterizations and precise description, Samrat Upadhyay shows us compelling clashes of the spiritual versus the temporal and carnal. This is a distinguished and captivating book.' –Lan MacMillan.
'Upadhyay invites us to participate in intense passions of quirky and imaginative individuals and couples in these wonderful stories full stories full of irony, compassion, wisdom and wit. Read and you will learn about Nepal as well as yourself.' –Josip Novakovich.
About the Author
Samrat Upadhyay was born and raised in Kathmandu, moving to the United States of America at the age of twenty-one. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best of the Fiction Workshops. The first Nepalese writer writing in English to be published in the west, he currently lives in Cleveland with his wife and daughter and is a professor at Baldwin-Wallace College.