HarperCollins Presents ‘Not Quite A Disaster After All’ by Buku Sarkar

is delighted to announce the publication of
Buku Sarkar’s
Not Quite a Disaster After All

In this house filled with voices and footsteps, a time allowed, and a time needed to bridge the discrepancy between who you were and who you wanted to become…

In six connected, haunting vignettes spanning two continents and two decades, we follow Anjali, misfit, the expensively educated daughter of a wealthy family, from her childhood in Calcutta to her coming of age in New York City, claiming the grimy dive bars of the East Village as her own. We also see her friend Anita, who struggles with the quieter life she has chosen, in an Ohio suburb.

These are women who muster all their resolve to make their way in the world, seeking their identity.

Not Quite a Disaster after All is a novel about how our expectations from life shift and change, how they can be pushed in the most unpredictable ways. It is about the thin line between self-destruction and survival. It is, equally, about falling in love—with a person, a city, or the alluring, exciting promise
of the new.

Deceptively simple in its telling, and gently ironic, this narrative of depth and power marks the arrival of an outstanding voice.

Author Buku Sarkar says: ‘I started writing these stories twelve years ago. I had warned myself back then: Don’t expect any results. Still ten years have passed, it’s a running tragedy of my life. Always a decade behind in realizations. But here it is, my first book, an ode to two cities: New York and Calcutta: One, where I was born; One, where I grew up.’

Poulomi Chatterjee, Publisher – Commercial Division, HarperCollins India, says: ‘We at HarperCollins India are delighted to be publishing Buku Sarkar’s beautiful debut, Not Quite a Disaster after All. What stood out for me when I first read it is how authentically the characters at the centre of these intricately connected stories push and pull and adjust as life goes about its way. Buku’s keen eye for detail as an accomplished photographer enables her to infuse a quiet moment, a ray of sunlight, a verbal exchange, a slight gesture, a stray observation with profundity and insight in the subtlest, most poignant way. For everyone looking for a wholesome, reflective read, this is the perfect book.’

PRAISE FOR BUKU SARKAR
‘Buku Sarkar knows intimately the worlds she paints with strokes of startling beauty and pain. Her men and women—and especially her children, and the haunting secrets they carry—will remain with readers for a long time.’—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Last Queen and Independence

‘Each sentence in this book shimmers with a quiet luminescence. These are stories of people divided between places, old selves in new worlds. With the poetry of Sandra Cisneros and the simplicity of Jhumpa Lahiri, Buku Sarkar weaves a book about homes lost and homes we yearn.’—Bilal Tanweer, author of The Scatter Here is Too Great

‘Not Quite a Disaster After All is sparkling debut, acutely observed and stylishly rendered, about intimacy and its aftertaste. It’s also quietly, languidly funny.’—Mohammed Hanif, author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Buku Sarkar is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in various magazines and journals including NYRB, n+1, Raleigh Review, Threepenny Review, The New York Times, Huffington Post and Mint Lounge. Her photographs have been exhibited at ICP in New York, Art Basel, Miami, and venues across the US and Europe and she has featured in Fleur and Arbor magazine and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. She received the Andrew Nelson Lytle Award for best short story in 2021. Her photobook Photowali Didi was published in 2022. Buku lives in Kolkata and New York.

ABOUT HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS INDIA
HarperCollins is also celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, having begun publishing in India in 1992. HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live! Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Harvard University Press, Gallup Press, Oneworld, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne,
Dover and Lonely Planet. HarperCollins India has won the Publisher of the Year Award four times at Tata Literature Live! in 2022, 2021, 2018 and 2016, and at Publishing Next in 2021 & 2015.

HarperCollins India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers.

For Book reviews, excerpt requests and interviews, please contact:
neha.kesarwani@harpercollins.co.in