Anjali Joseph’s third novel tells two tenuously connected stories of two dissimilar people living thousands of miles apart. Thirty-something Claire lives in Norwich, England, with her teenage son, Jason, and works in a shoe factory. Claire, estranged from her family and long out of touch with Jason’s father, makes ends meet but lives a sterile and inert emotional life. She goes to work without regret because it is a kind of labour that, though often tedious, occupies her physically and intellectually and provides welcome distraction from her empty love life and other worries. Eventually she meets a man, Damian, with whom she strikes up a casually romantic relationship. But where love is concerned, Claire is reserved and tentative, unable to commit, to take the next step. After she and Damian meet a few times and have fun, she starts putting him off and pretending to not be available. But when he stops calling she is assailed by confusion and regret. When her father dies, and she has no choice but to reconnect with members of her family, the hurts and grudges of the past come rushing back. In the novel’s other thread, we meet Arun, in his late sixties, a reformed but still susceptible alcoholic, who lives in India and earns a modest wage by making sandals by hand, an outmoded but exacting craft that he knows will soon be lost. Arun’s story is one heavy with forebodings of mortality. Arun is suffering from physical indignities that are consistent with his age and history of alcohol abuse, and he resists visiting the doctor because of what he might discover. Arun both loves and resents his wife, whose strong and steady demeanor is the glue holding the family together. Their lengthy up and down marriage, which survived his drinking and an affair he had with a local woman, has remained steady, though his relationships with his two sons are strained. As the days pass and he senses physical decline signalling that his time on earth is limited, the affair and accompanying guilt are increasingly on his mind. Joseph’s novel, vividly written and filled with painterly detail, though lacking somewhat in immediacy and narrative drive, urgently evokes sensations of remorse and reproach as Claire and Arun struggle to come to terms with decisions they have made and how those decisions continue to affect the people they love. The two stories, split into four alternating sections, are not linked in any conventional sense, though each carries thematic echoes of the other. The Living is a wise and beautiful book that shines a light on human nature at its most vulnerable and exposed. However, readers will likely finish it with as many questions about the structure as about the fates of the two main characters. ( )

Not a book I warmed to unfortunately. Characters were not that believable. ( )