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    The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

    Published by Random House Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE BOSTON GLOBE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BUSTLE, AND EMILY GOULD, THE MILLIONS

    For fans of J. Courtney Sullivan, Meg Wolitzer, Mona Simpson, and Jhumpa Lahiri comes a winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past.
     
    With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom. The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life's uncertainties.
     
    Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, prone to exaggeration, tells their daughter, Amina, a photographer living in Seattle.
     
    Reluctantly Amina returns home and finds a situation that is far more complicated than her mother let on, with roots in a trip the family, including Amina's rebellious brother Akhil, took to India twenty years earlier. Confronted by Thomas's unwillingness to explain himself, strange looks from the hospital staff, and a series of puzzling items buried in her mother's garden, Amina soon realizes that the only way she can help her father is by coming to terms with her family's painful past. In doing so, she must reckon with the ghosts that haunt all of the Eapens.
     
    Praise for The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing
     
    "With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart."—People
     
    "Optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty."—Associated Press
     
    "By turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion . . . [Jacob's] characters shimmer with life."—Entertainment Weekly
     
    "A rich, engrossing debut told with lightness and care."—The Kansas City Star
     
    "[A] sprawling, poignant, often humorous novel . . . Told with humor and sympathy for its characters, the book serves as a bittersweet lesson in the binding power of family, even when we seek to break out from it."—O: The Oprah Magazine
     
    "Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow. . . . When her plot springs surprises, she lets them happen just as they do in life: blindsidingly right in the middle of things."—The Boston Globe
     
    "This is an effortlessly gorgeous and rich book. Its prose is lovely and precise, alternately luminous and direct; its observations of people and families and the physical world are poignant and a delight. The dialogue is sharp, funny, and true. This is a triumphant debut!"—Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!
     
    "Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable; . . . both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Audio
    Release dateJul 1, 2014
    ISBN9780804193245
    Unavailable
    The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

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    Reviews for The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

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    • 5/5
      In-depth, layered, engaging novel about a bereaved family that conveys a wide range of emotion without being cliched or saccharine. The dialogue is particularly strong, and the writer's switching between present and past events keeps the interest level high. The relationships between the family members and extended family-like nature of the immigrant community in the novel are very well portrayed.
    • 4/5
      It has taken me a very long time to write this review. It also took me a long time to finish this book. I am so conflicted about how I feel about this novel. The beginning of the novel was stellar. I was completely absorbed in story of Amina's family and their visit back home to India. I wanted to know more about their life and time there. Unfortunately, that section of the book was very brief. Most of the book focused on the Eapen family life in America. Here is where I felt it lagged. The most detailed descriptions were of the food they ate, and I found myself wanting to try Indian food. What I didn't crave was the bland details of Amina's current life as an adult. The supernatural elements of the story were interesting to me, and ultimately saved this book from getting a 2 star rating. The last 75-100 pages were very heartwarming and beautiful. In the end, I would give this 3.5 stars Book was provided free from the publisher. Review is unbiased
    • 5/5
      I seem to enjoy books whose setting is India. This one was no exception with its frequent mention of Indian foods, customs, and country. I also loved the observations of Americans by Indian characters. "Americans get into this idea that you do one thing to make money and then live like royalty when you are away from it." The author uses lots off interesting similies: "takeout food boxes slumped together like old men in bad weather." Each character had been fully fleshed out.The story is poignant and realistic, and I came away satisfied with the tale.
    • 4/5
      When her father begins acting strangely, Amina returns home to investigate. An intimate portrait of an immigrant family from India, and how their background affects each family member in different ways.
    • 4/5
      Story of a family that have to come to terms with the death of a much loved son and brother. Family dynamics ae complicated and everyone dealt with the tragedy in their own way. When the patriarch of the family devellops a brain tumor, emotions resurface.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, and a fully human story. If this novel does not get nominated for some sort of major award, it will be a crime. Mira Jacob is my new standard for writing.
    • 4/5
      Amina is the daughter of Thomas and Kamala, Indian immigrants. Thomas is a neurosurgeon who finds happiness in the US but Kamala misses India.Thomas is estranged from his mother who didn't want him to leave India.Amina leaves this unhappy home and moves to Seattle until her mothercalls her home to Arizona because Thomas is ill. Amina struggles tohelp her parents who are grieving the loss of Akhil, Amina's brother.The family finally heals and finds peace when they accept Thomas's decision to reject treatment because of hallucinatory visions thatenable him to see his deceased son.
    • 4/5
      The novel focuses on Amina, a photographer who has left photojournalism and become an event photographer. This is really a family story; her parents immigrated from India so her father could pursue his work as a neurosurgeon, but family woes have followed him and become embedded in the family's life in New Mexico. Amina has much to grieve as well as a support system, and the chapters alternate between different times and settings in a clear fashion that propels the story and clarifies the characters.
    • 5/5
      Delightfully Wonderful! This debut novel was full of quirky, fun, loveable characters. Characters full of color and depth. The characters were brought to life and I felt as if I knew them. Very memorable characters that will be very hard for me to forget. It was never boring. I enjoyed reading every page from beginning to end. I absolutely adored this story!

      Humor, Self-discovery, love, family, heartbreak, loss, adventure, culture, what didn't this book have? The story was beautifully woven!

      This novel makes you stop and reflect on your own life. Where we are in life, where we want to be, what's really important in life? This story shows us how precious yet short life truly is! Live each day as if it's your last! Make each moment count!

      I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BEAUTIFUL STORY!
    • 4/5
      This debut novel was a little slow to get started but by the end of the 500+ pages I fell in love with these quirky characters. Spanning 20 years is a story of family, heartbreak and acknowledging the painful past coming full circle to the healing present. I won this book through Library Thing giveaways. Thank you!
    • 4/5
      Fantastic novel, especially as it is Mira Jacob's first novel. The characters are real and relatable. The format of juxtaposing countries and time periods worked well, focusing on the three most traumatic times in the Eapen family's experience. The characters, settings, and experiences related are rich. Writing style and character development are the two biggest criteria for me in reading fiction, and Jacob excels at both.
    • 5/5
      The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing brings us a cast of sometimes looney, but always loveable characters whose quirks are laid out for all to see, and whose struggles to become integrated into their society while holding onto their unique cultural identity are easily understood by anyone who has ever felt "different" for whatever reason.The publisher's notes about the premise "Brain surgeon Thomas Eapen's decision to shorten his visit to his mother's home in India has consequences that reverberate two decades later as he starts conversing with the dead and daughter Amina must sort through the family's past to help him." give us just a hint of the magic and mayhem the reader deals with in this story of three generations of family coming to grips with illness, emmigration, and different cultural norms - especially for young women.The main character, Amina Eapen is a 20 something budding photographer living in Seattle who is called home to Albuquerque by her mother to help with her father Thomas' strange behavior. (He's talking to dead people for one thing.) Not only does Amina have to decide if this call for help is just a ploy on her mother's part to get her home again, but she has to sort out whether or not her father truly needs help and what she is responsible for doing. All during her visit, various relatives appear, (among them her cousin "Dimple" the all-American girl who has fully adopted to not only the American way of life, but to the full feminist agenda) telling stories about the family back in India, and pulling Amina further along into the family past, not to mention trying to convince her to abandon her job in Seattle, and find a nice Indian boy to marry to settle down near her parents.Mira does a fantastic job of weaving back and forth from past to present, of painting word pictures that have us seeing, hearing and smelling all the elements of the cultures this family is dealing with. It's an emotional roller-coaster; it's a long read that takes a while to settle into; but in the end it's a story of love, forgiveness, acceptance, and hope. It's perfect to settle into as the nights lengthen this autumn. I just wish we had a good Indian take-away close by!I had so much fun with this I checked out the audio also. It's exceptionally well done - read by the author - and really gives the listener an added emotional dimension. Her ability to give different voices and accents to the characters is exceptional.
    • 3/5
      I'm sorry, I don't believe a debut novel should ever be 500 pages long. Why would an editor allow it? Mira Jacobs knows how to write, that's for sure. Her descriptions are fabulous, decadent, and almost tangible. Her plotting, however, is not tight, and it took me ages to get through this book. More careful editing was needed to trim this tome down into something more manageable. I did receive this book as part of the Early Reviewers program.
    • 3/5
      I received a free copy. There is really quite a lot going on in this book, a very ambitious effort for a debut author. The story didn't take hold for me until page 200; nothing about it drew me back into it after setting it aside for a time. But then it finally got more interesting. I'm just very sorry it took its sweet time doing so! I probably would have given it 2 stars, but for some of the decriptions of the characters' feelings of grief and how love can grow in the midst of it all. That was its salvation.
    • 4/5
      I won this book through a Goodreads giveaway. Thanks again Goodreads! Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing opens with protagonist Amina Eapen receiving a worried phone call from her mother concerning her father's recent penchant for engaging in full-on conversations with deceased family members. Concerned, Amina decamps from Seattle, where she has established herself as a wedding photographer, to her hometown of Albuquerque. The story then sprans through three decades and two countries to help paint the picture of the Eapen family as they cope with immigrating from India, adjusting to life in America, weathering the challenges of growing up, and dealing with a collective broken heart. This sprawling, historical novel is both effortlessly spellbinding and deeply profound. I read that it took Mira Jacob ten years to finish this, and the depth and tenderness she thoroughly developed the characters really shines through. She courts powerful emotions with precision and lovingness. Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is an impressive debut and a fabulous read.
    • 4/5
      Amina returns home to New Mexico (from Seattle) because her mother hints that her father might be ill. There are flashbacks to Amina's childhood; both to the last family holiday in India (where her parents were born) and to a later period focussing on her brother and his tragic death. Finally there are references to Amina's adult past and to a famous photograph she took which led to her turning to work as a wedding photographer.I found the various shifts in time clear and they gradually built up to a picture of what led up to the present crisis. I liked the description of Amina's love for but frustration with her mother and the chapter dealing with the holiday in India was so well done that I found it excruciating along with the characters. Jamie was sweet and I thought the relationship between him and Amina convincing. Some of the detailed descriptions of photos Amina had taken were hard to get as enthralled by as I think we were supposed to be, but overall an excellent novel.
    • 3/5
      I just couldn't get into "The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing" by Mira Jacob. Maybe it was when I was trying to read it or something but it's length was a problem for me. It's a long book but feels long too. Read if you are into a generational story about Indian-Americans.
    • 5/5
      The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing delivers a hilarious and moving story of three generations of an Indian (South Asian) family. Mira Jacob delivers complex characters, nuanced relationships, and an engrossing story.The book opens with Amina Eapen, single professional photographer working on weddings and celebrations, learns from her mother Kamala that her brain surgeon father Thomas has been acting strange. Thomas has apparently been seeing and speaking to dead family members and seems even more distracted than usual. Amina finds replacement photographers for her assignments and leaves her comfortable life for what she expected would be one week.But as Amina learns more details of her parents' changed behavior, she finds that she's unable to return to her old job and life - at least until things normalize. Her close family friend, a.k.a. "cousin" Dimples, is a go-getter, beautiful and works at an art gallery. Dimples is used to getting her way and has no qualms about taking advantage of Amina. But even in her most manipulative, Dimples is still a sympathetic character.Throughout the novel, even the most difficult and temperamental characters are easy to sympathize with and to love. Mira Jacob gives us a beautiful and sympathetic immigrant story from multiple points of view: the perspective of the parents left behind in the homeland who long for their successful doctor son Thomas to return and the resentful and overlooked younger brother who lives with the widowed mother in the family home, the successful Thomas who has decided to make a home in Albuquerque with his Indian wife Kamala and their young children, the brilliant children who adjust, with differing degrees of success, to their lives in their privileged part of America.
    • 3/5
      *i received this book from a First Reads Giveaway*

      I SO wanted to love this book. It had all of the checkpoints of an "Oh Yeah, Abby's Gonna Love This" Book. Story spanning several decades? Check. Story follows a family and explores the relationships within that family? Check. Book jacket hints at supernatural/magical undertones? Triple check. What I ended up reading, however, was what I feel is a book that's couple hundred pages too long, with a story full of people who were well developed, but did not grow at all until the end.

      While I won't give too much away of the story, so as not to spoil it for anyone, I will say that Mira Jacob is phenomenal with the written word. The structure of the novel and the weaving in of different points of the Eapen family history was great and sincerely refreshing. One really gets a sense of the family dynamic from the very first chapter. It is no surprise that they are so familiar to the reader so quickly, being that it took Jacob over ten years to finish writing the book. It was very easy to see that these characters were very close to her heart.

      The most frustrating part of this book was that no one really wanted any of their family members to know their true feelings. I spent 400 pages reading about them telling each other they were fine, only to have the last 100 zoom by at warp speed with feelings being unearthed and the family (somewhat) moving forward. Maybe that was done on purpose, and other readers may have liked it...but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

      I will definitely be reading another of her books should she write more in the future.
    • 4/5
      This was an early review book. It is one of those books where you say I'm just going to finish this chapter and 50 pages later you are still reading, and I'm not really sure why it was so compelling. It is well written, but not fantastic. Jacob does not do that much with description but she has a very good knack at writing dialogue. Flipping mostly between 1998 and 1982-83, the story focuses on an Indian family who migrated to Albuquerque in 1968. The blurbs say that this is what it was like for them away from their native country. The father, Thomas is a doctor and as would be expected has a lot of contact with all types of people. The mother, Kamala seems to hate her existence but we really don't see that she made any attempt to try to live outside of her Indian friends and family. I would have liked to have known more of what happened between 1968 and 1982. That being said, I thought the book was too long. Because it was compelling, I just wanted to say "get on with it", we have been here before. There was a lot going on in this book which sometimes robbed one story line for another and the way Amina got her show seemed a bit contrived. I know very little about the Indian culture but I do have a good friend who is a Christian from India and if her boys spoke to her the way Amina and Akhil spoke to their parents, I doubt that they would be among the living today. That bothered me because it didn't seem true but I would think Ms. Jacob would know. I did understand the grief of losing a child and a sibling and it is hard to be judgmental of actions taken by those who are affected. One just hopes they can come to some peace and get on with their lives. Even with my criticisms, I would recommend this book.
    • 5/5
      It took me a long time to get into this novel because I didn't have much interest in Indian culture and I wasn't familiar with a few terms, so I had to keep stopping to look things up. Once I got over the initial hurdle, it was smooth sailing. This book spans over lifetimes of several characters, but it doesn't truly involve time travel. It involves beautiful descriptions, heavy emotions and it weaves a fantastic web of a family that has it's ups and downs. It's a contemporary and a historic novel at the same time and it isn't politics, thank goodness. Loved this book and it's highly recommended from me!
    • 4/5
      This is an unusual book about a family saga that takes place in India and in America, about the differences between the two cultures. I really enjoyed it. I particularly like how Amina the narrator tells us the story of her family and finally finds out truth about what happened in the past. I defintiely recommend it! It's a great read!
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this one!
    • 4/5
      A book about different ways the unconscious affects our actions. Amina is a Seattle-based photographer who gets a call from her mother telling her her father is up all night talking to himself. She goes home to Albuquerque and the ghosts of the family's past. The book is a joy to read, with a careful structure and flowing sentences. Parallels abound and provide a gentle backbeat to the narrative. There is the theme of the returned boy. In a memory, Amina and her family visit the paternal family in India. Sajeev, her father, has a terrible fight with his mother and brother. In the present, Amina runs into Jamie, a boy she knew and loved in high school. And of course there is Akhil, Amina's brother, the memory-ghost who is in some ways the main character of the story. There are redressing reenactments. The visit to India, which ends disastrously and has an emotional impact that lingers for all involved, is redone and done better--repaired--by Amina's visit home. In the more distant past Sajeev's departure from India as a young man forces his brother to accept a role he doesn't want. Akhil's departure doesn't prevent Amina from becoming a photographer. In fact her grief becomes courage, and pain and ugliness are an essential part of her art.The title is atrocious. They might as well have called it Keep Calm and Dream On. The somebody's guide to something is done finished over through. Sleepwalking, though, can be seen as the subject of the book. Sleepwalking as letting the unconscious take over. It can lead many different ways--toward death, toward art, or toward peace. Amina is often described as not knowing quite why she clicked the shutter [at that moment, on that object]. Emotions are things that pass through bodies. Feelings descend, as if they themselves are beings that haunt and inhabit. Everything is seen through Amina's eyes (she is the camera ho ho), except for one scene: at her brother's funeral Amina "does not see" the reactions of the other mourners. In this scene, Akhil is there--Akhil's ghost--and he is the witness. And then there is Kamala, the matriarch. "The unwilling immigrant, the dubious participant, the damned and damning loner" (p 495). The book ends with an image of her, just off the plane from India, heading across the tarmac to her new life in Albuquerque. Is it a coincidence her name sounds like camera?
    • 4/5
      A free book that was excellent. Maybe it was because I loved the cultural issues and the characters were so wonderful. Thanks for the book. Well worth the read. There were some unanswered questions which may have added to the book - will not give it away.
    • 5/5
      This is another excellent novel exploring the theme of immigrant adaptation to America. Amina is a young Indian-American woman struggling to develop a career as a photographer while dealing with her father's illness and decline. Character development is a clear strength of Jacob's writing. She follows Amina's relationships with her extended family emphasizing the inevitable differences between the older generation attempting to cling to their culture and the younger trying to adapt to life in America. She succeeds in creating realistic characters who maintain their individualism while displaying genuine affection for each other. The plot develops slowly but maintains an ample amount of tension to hold the reader's attention. Jacob's approach to the general theme of coping with the loss of loved ones through death and cultural change will resonate with a wider audience than those just seeking to understand the immigrant experience with cultural assimilation.
    • 4/5
      This was a beautifully written first novel. I became very invested in the lives of Amina, a first generation American of Indian heritage, along with her family and friends.
    • 4/5
      Good book. Easy to read with nice descriptive narration. Will read this author again.
    • 4/5
      Mira Jacob's debut, "The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing", is a heart-felt examination of a second generation Indian immigrant, Amina Eapen, and her quirky family. When her mother suddenly demands Mina take a leave of absence from her Seattle-based photography job to return to her New Mexico family-home because of an emergency, Mina finds herself forced into an examination of her life so far. There is so much going on in this book, I find I'm having a hard time summarizing it. Needless to say, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read, both funny and poignant. It's also very accessible; this isn't a story about immigration and culture shock. It's about love, friendship, family, sleep, ghosts, food, photography, and grief. In fact, the latter may be what this book is primarily about: loss. The Eapens have experienced a great deal of it; loss has formed each of them. Mina may in fact be more a descendent of grief than of Indian heritage. I really recommend this book. There is an underlying wonder to this story; a thread of magic that just peeks through. I enjoyed it thoroughly and though it's title and cover aren't terribly grabbing, for those who enjoy family stories this one hits the mark.
    • 4/5
      My feelings on this one are a bit mixed. I think that may be because it functions (or, tries to function) on so many different levels. It's part coming of age novel, part immigration novel, part contemporary romance, part the story of a family in crisis, part chick lit. The main character, Amina Eapen, is a would-be art photographer/now wedding photographer who lives in Seatlle with her prettier, livelier cousin, Dimple. Her mother calls to tell her that something is wrong with her father, a brain surgeon, and she needs to come home. Thomas, it seems, has started conversing with his deceased mother. At this point, the novel starts jumping back and forth in time. There is a long section about a family trip to visit family in India, where we learn that Thomas's mother never approved of his marriage and blames his wife, Kamala, for the fact that they did not move back to India after he completed medical school. All kinds of family dysfunction starts to come out of the walls, both in India and, when the Eapens return to the US, at home, and a number of tragedies occur. A second trip down memory lane focuses on Amina's teenage years: her relationship with her now deceased brother, their teenage romances, quarrels with and between her parents, etc. And then we return to the present day crisis and how the family deals with it.While I can't say that I loved this book, it did keep me interested, and I thought some of the characters, particularly Amina's parents, were very well drawn, and it's more the story of a loving family in distress than the typical immigration story.