The City Son

Set in Samrat Upadhyay s signature and timeless Nepal, The City Son offers a vivid portrait of a scorned woman s lifelong obsession with revenge and the devastating ramifications for an impressionable young man.
Acclaimed and award-winning author Samrat Upadhyay the first Nepali-born novelist writing in English to be published in the West has crafted a spare, understated work examining a taboo subject: a wife s obsession with her husband s illegitimate son. When Didi discovers that her husband, the Masterji, has been hiding his beautiful lover and their young son, Tarun, in a nearby city, she takes the Masterji back into her grasp and expels his second family. Tarun s mother, heartsick and devastated, slowly begins to lose her mind, and Tarun turns to Didi for the mothering he longs for. But as Tarun gets older, Didi s domination of the boy turns from the emotional to the physical, and the damages she inflicts spiral outward, threatening to destroy Tarun s one chance at true happiness. Potent, disturbing, and gorgeously stark in its execution, The City Son is a novel not soon forgotten."