''An Obedient Father'' is a 2000 novel by

Akhil Sharma Akhil Sharma (born July 22, 1971) is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel ''An Obedient Father'' won the 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, PEN/Hemingway Award. His second, ''Family Life ( ...

. It received the 2001

Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award The PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction is awarded annually to a full-length novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a full-length book of fiction. The award is named after Ernest Hemingway and fun ...

and

Whiting Writers' Award The Whiting Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama Drama is the specific Mode (literature), mode of fiction Mimesis, represented in performance: a Play (theatre), play, ...

. Set during the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the story is about a corrupt and loathsome bag man who lives with his daughter and granddaughter in a New Delhi slum. The novel started as a short story that was previously published. In his interview for the ''

Paris Review ''The Paris Review'' is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, ''The Paris Review'' published new works by Jack Kerouac, ...

s series " My First Time", Sharma described creating his main character as "looking for someone who was guilty appropriately... There's that Henry James quote that 'it doesn't matter if a character is good or bad, it matters if the character is interesting.' So that's how I began to figure how to write about someone like (the main character)." In July 2022, McNally Editions published a considerably revised, shorter edition of the novel, with a very different ending.

References

2000 American novels Fiction set in 1991 Novels set in the 1990s Indian-American novels Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award–winning works Novels set in Delhi Works about the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi American historical novels 2000 debut novels Indian Peace Keeping Force {{2000s-hist-novel-stub