One of the Wall Street Journal ’s Ten Best Books of the Year A Guardian , Chicago Public Library, and BBC Best Book of the Year “A seriously impressive achievement.” ―John Self, Financial Times An ingenious, devastating, explosive novel about the ramifications of choice from "one of the most original and talented authors working today" (NPR). "How ought one to live?" This is the question that obsesses London-based publisher Ayush, driving him to question every act of consumption. He embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him: his practical economist husband; their twins; and even the authors he edits and publishes. One of those authors, a mysterious M. N. Opie, writes a story about a young academic involved in a car accident that causes her life to veer in an unexpected direction. Another author, an economist, describes how the gift of a cow to an impoverished family on the West Bengal–Bangladesh border sets them on a startling path to tragedy. Together, these connected narratives raise the question: How free are we really to make our own choices? In a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, Neel Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. "Mukherjee is brilliant at tracing the ways a choice deferred becomes a fate sealed.… [C]ool, calm, all-noticing." ― Jonathan Lee, New York Times Book Review "There are no obviously right or wrong decisions in these stories, only a series of actions that trap the characters within their own set of consequences.… Mr. [Neel] Mukherjee pulls the reader into these problems with a seriousness and technical excellence that makes a lot of what is published today seem immature. Choice asks much of readers. But, for all its pessimism, it trusts us to be up to it." ― Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "Like many contemporary writers, Mukherjee is anxious about injustice. But in this brilliant, bleak moral maze of a novel, where every right turn is a wrong one, we will find no lessons about what is to be done―even if Lenin lurks in the epigraphs. Choice is more like the tale of the enlightenment of Buddha, the awakened one (the woke one, we’d say today), which Ayush fixates on: it rouses our moral intuitions from privileged slumber and spurs us not to action, but to intricate contemplation of what actions mean." ― Tanjil Rashid, Guardian " Choice is full of moments like this: complex, happily contradictory little flowerings of correspondence that can really be appreciated only in retrospect.… [Mukherjee] is capable of sustained stretches of syntactically enterprising, engagingly disputatious prose, at once conversational and poetically compressed." ― Nat Segnit, Times Literary Supplement "Beautifully written. There are countless wonderful descriptions…and subtle psychological insights." ― Benjamin Markovits, Telegraph "Mukherjee impresses. He captivates readers but also stimulates them by rigorously exploring race, agency, equality, the weight of our moral quandaries and the implications of our choices." ― Malcolm Forbes, Minnesota Star Tribune "Probing and ambitious, this is an engaging work from a fabulously gifted writer." ― Booklist "Searing, poetic, and beautifully brutal, Choice reveals just how far the imagination―when buoyed by courage and conscience―can travel. One realization I take with me from Mukherjee’s intrepid prose is this: to be honest in our living, and to refuse despair, is to assent to a whole new vocabulary of humility." ― Tracy K. Smith, author of To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul "Neel Mukherjee is a great novelist.… He knows how to clothe ethical conflicts with sweeping narrative and convincing detail. The range of his knowledge―from London intellectual and professional life today to the precarious hardships of the ‘ultra-poor’ in Bengal―is shockingly deep. He is a writer of genius." ― Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover " Choice is Neel Mukherjee’s best book yet: a brooding meditation on the complexities of agency and duty, freedom and guilt, in a savagely unequal world. It’s a vital, haunting, devastating read." ― Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests "A searing indictment of neoliberal folly, a profound and beautiful meditation on compassion, Choice is exactly the kind of novel we need now―the kind that nobody but Neel Mukherjee can write." ― Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting "A magnificent accomplishment. In each panel of this masterful triptych―or each movement of this classical sonata―exquisite prose gradually crescendos to jaw-dropping revelations.… Choice is a deeply human novel, and a humane one.… We come to realize, to feel through experiencing the successive waves of the novel’s movements, that a human life is not simply the result of rational choices but rather, as Neel Mukherjee puts it, the lull between them―