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A Play for the End of the World
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
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A Play for the End of the World
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Publisher's Summary
A dazzling novel—set in early 1970s New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of World War II, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance.
“Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history ... an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion
New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.
Traveling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.
What the critics say
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award’s Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction • Named the Jewish Fiction Award Honor Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries • Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award • Oprah Daily’s “30 of the Best Fall Books of 2021 to Cuddle Up With” • Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s “Books of the Month\" • Alma’s “Favorite Books for Fall 2021” • Paperback Paris’s “Debut Books We’re Excited To Read” • Jewish Insider’s “10 new books to read in September”
“A Play for the End of the World looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history. Jai Chakrabarti is a lyrical writer, and this is an impressive debut.”—Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion
“Like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, Chakrabarti explores his flawed, bewildered characters’ fine-grained emotional shifts when confronted with confusing, violent political movements. . . . These novelists are, at their hearts, elegists for time gone by."—The Washington Post
"The haunted man at the heart of Jai Chakrabarti’s A Play for the End of the World is one of the few survivors of a generation, a Polish immigrant in New York who can’t forget the makeshift family that was transported to Treblinka without him. . . . As the novel moves between [America and India] with interludes that return to the Warsaw ghetto, we come to understand Jaryk’s guilt-stricken ‘need to burrow into oblivion’—and to hope that another need will somehow uproot it.”—The New York Times Book Review