“To know a country so you have its dirt beneath your fingernails is a difficult thing. Read Nobody Does the Right Thing and you will have India beneath your fingernails.”—Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father
“Nobody Does the Right Thing is a deeply compassionate novel about art, life, and everything that lies in between.”—Laila Lalami, author of Secret Son
“Nobody Does the Right Thing imaginatively portrays the forces shaping contemporary India, and it is a remarkable reader of mass culture and popular narrative forms, of the worlds of Hindi cinema, pulp fiction, sensational journalism, and globalized media.”—Siddhartha Deb, author ofAn Outline of the Republic andThe Point of Return
“Nobody Does the Right Thing is a quietly but deeply impressive novel. It not only takes us into the living, ambivalent textures of an India that is relatively little written about: the India of villages, highways, second-class train compartments, and old but second-rate metropolises. It also transforms itself, in the process, into an exemplar ofhow that variegated terrain might be addressed.”—Amit Chaudhuri, author ofThe Immortals
In a scene late in Amitava Kumar’s novel, Home Products, the protagonist Binod is returning home with his family from Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre after watching a powerful Hindi adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play, The Glass Menagerie. “Binod felt the tragedy they had witnessed on stage had also made their own small sufferings pleasant and lyrical,” writes Kumar. His novel might be thought of as exploring the question of how art, which is a representation of life, also impacts life, triggering memories, provoking connections and being assimilated till it practically becomes a home product.” Chandrahas Choudhury, Mint
“The fact that Home Products has been written in conversation with Hindi literature is astonishing. I can think of no other English language novel that does this.”Chapati Mystery review
Amitava Kumar’s essay,How to Write a Novel, The Hindu
The fact that Home Products has been written in conversation with Hindi literature is astonishing. I can think of no other English language novel that does this.”Chapati Mystery review
The Big Indian Picture Interview
Lunch with Business Standard, Jai Arjun Singh
Book notes for the novel at Largehearted Boy
“Mofussil Junction,” Northeast Review
Between the Lines interview