Cover Image: A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

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Member Reviews

I enjoy a deeply moving short story, and this was a solid collection. There were some I cared for more than others, and so I did skip a couple that didn’t appeal in the first couple pages read. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

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I love a good set of stories and A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness delivers. The Overnight Bus and Searching for Elijah were two of my favorites.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

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3.5 ⭐️

Honestly, I wish this book was longer and the stories more drawn out; I enjoyed them that much. I loved the ambiguity of all the different endings, but I found myself wanting to know more about the characters and what happens next. I think it’s a really special talent to engross readers with a short story. I found myself getting into the different characters, their stories, their pasts and futures, which is hard to do.

The author is clearly creative to give us a handful of unique stories, I liked the blended cultures (Indian, Jewish, American) while the overall themes of family, love, sacrifice, and identity that were apparent in all the stories brought it all together.

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Great collection of stories--heartfelt and real. I liked some stories more than others, as is typical of a collection, but thought the writing was stellar overall and the characters were well-drawn and interesting.

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Gorgeous writing, emotional stories. They cover a variety of topics and types of relationships, but the thread of melancholy runs through them. Not to mention that the cover and title are so beautiful. Love this collection, and it makes an excellent gift as well.

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Fifteen stories - of family, of relationships, of parenthood, of nurturing men and achieving women. Each of them made me want to put down the book, absorb and then try to move onto the next. The stories are a revelation. There is a keen understanding of the human condition and I felt they are written with much compassion for what life throws at us and how we deal with it.
I like short stories for all that they say and all that they leave to you to interpret. Jai Chakrabarti has done justice to the format though the stories are longer than the normal fare.
Some of my favorites were
- Searching for Elijah where an indian widow with a son engaged to a jewish man and trying to find the way forward
- The Import where The mixed couple importing help from India to look after their child in an effort to make more of their marriage
- In the Bug Room where on returning permanently from the US, the son must come to terms with transformed circumstances and social order
- A mother’s work, The Narrow Bridge, The Overnight Bus were some others that stood out for me
The author is comfortable and convincing while writing about two completely different worlds - whether its America or India. Some settings straddle both worlds so easily- a reality for a lot of us immigrants.
And that is what he brings out the best - that you can be part of one truth while internalising another.

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This is a collection of short stories centered around relationships and love - opposite and same sex, parent-child, pseudo parent-child, employer-servant, etc. The relationships are poignant and practical, some colored with pathos and sacrifice, others mired in tradition and generosity. Short stories are challenging - telling a story in a short span and ensuring a satisfying conclusion. The author achieves this goal in the majority of the stories. The characters are all interestingly different, some with flaws and all. I enjoyed the unique flavors and cultural settings of all the stories. My favorite ones are: A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, A Mother’s Work, and The Fortune of Others. My favorite character was the Kabuliwallah in the last story: The Fortune of Others. If you enjoy short stories and like exploring human and cultural perspectives, I’d recommend this book. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

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These are compassionate,. carefully-crafted stories. It is not a collection to be read all the way through. These stories demand individual, undivided attention. And they reward us for that with layers that keep revealing themselves to us long after reading. I enjoyed Jai Chakrabarti's debut historical novel. This collection is a worthy follow-up. I'm look forward to his third fiction work.

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Jai Chakrabarti’s A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness is a series of 14 short stories exploring the theme of family through the lens of the South Asian immigrant experience. The stories capture a variety of unconventional families - including same-sex couples in forbidden relationships and mixed-race couples not quite on the same wavelength - and doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects like miscarriage and the change of identity that occurs with parenthood. The prose has a lovely rhythm and lyricism that makes each story very readable.

Ultimately, though, I was left with the feeling that I was being strung along from story to story wondering what new trauma or hardship would be the theme of the next. The third person narration common to so many of these stories feels distanced, such that the emotional turns never quite pay off. This can make the story endings feel abrupt; while I don’t mind a story that ends in the middle of the action, these stories sometimes ended before I realized the emotional arc had already come and gone.

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Beautiful writing, interesting stories and surprisingly complex characters within the short stories. I really liked this one!

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Short stories can and often do have an abrupt and quirky effect. They end too fast and too soon and there’s some weird twist especially at the end, possibly related to that abruptness. In a collection, all those characteristics are magnified. That being said, I prefer this author’s longer format.

The 15 stories themselves are idiosyncratic in topic, occurrences, and endings. They all have some South Asian character, except for Mendel’s Wall. I liked “Lilavati’s Fire,” “Lost Things,” “Daisy Lane,” “The Narrow Bridge,” “Searching for Elijah,” “A Mother’s Work,” “When the Tantric Came to Town,” “In the Bug Room,” “The Overnight Bus,” “The Fortunes of Others.”

I thought each story was a good read and I enjoyed them. As a whole book, the impact --that quirkiness, I described-- becomes tiresome and/or redundant. I came to expect a zinger near the end, that other shoe dropping.

Thanks to Knopf for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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This collection of short stories addresses themes of migration, parenthood, and loss. Many characters are Indian immigrants to America, or former emigres attempting to return home. Others are observant Jews. Several characters long for children, others have them, and a few struggle at the border in between. Love between adults is accompanied by obligation and demand.

In other words - despite taking place in a spare and haunting literary world - these stories are a lot like life. I found most of them interesting and a few of them memorable. Although this collection was not quick reading, it was worth the time.

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I was intrigued by this book's focus on Indian and Jewish characters. Unfortunately, this book was pretty unremarkable to me, with only a couple of stories that I really enjoyed. Most of the stories focused on romantic relationships and having children, which I couldn't personally relate to. I was also a little distracted by some inaccuracies about Judaism, for instance a family has a catered Passover dinner that includes miso soup, which is not kosher for Passover.

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I simply didn’t get it. I read the short stories that just ended where they ended, a few memorable characters, but they were done before you knew it. Too many endings left unresolved and some stories were just odd.

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I was disappointed that these vignettes only describe heartbreaking pain and never end in happiness as suggested by the title. The writing is good, the stories relatable on many levels, but absolutely no redemption for the humans involved.

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This little book contains 14 short stories. They deal with topics like marriage, child-bearing, child-rearing, religion, and family.
In most cases, the characters faced life-altering decisions that tugged on their traditions or affected their futures. I found myself wondering what I would do in their same situations. But since each story involved Indian or Jewish cultures, I couldn't always relate. I appreciated the insight into new cultures, though.
I really like the emotional content. Many of these stories sucked me in. And as I read, I felt sadness, anger or hope.
I devoured this book in one sitting and found that the stories became repetitive. But I still recommend the book.

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The overall impression left with me from these fourteen short stories is that the tension between family and culture and individual desires causes a continual tug of war. In these vignettes the characters face obligations and obstacles and dilemmas that are exacerbated or caused by their Indian backgrounds. However, we can all identify with the kind of struggles we face when family and beliefs do not support our lifestyle and desires.

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This was a 2.5 rounded up to a 3 for me. As with any collection of short stories, there were hits and misses, but altogether I did not find this to be very memorable.

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