Storytellers of the year: Mira Jacob

Mira Jacob
Author, Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing
Kamala and Thomas Eapen left India in search of a better existence, raising their children, Amina and Akhil, in dusty New Mexico. Amina moves to Seattle, but an urgent phone call from her prone-to-exaggeration mother draws her back into a life she left behind. Mira Jacob takes us with her as she follows the family across decades, discovering the ways in which grief outlines their efforts at fashioning a new life. All through the narrative, it is easy to sympathise with even the most volatile characters. And, the Eapens soon feel like relatives to a reader, even if he or she hasn’t been raised on chutney and sambhar. The title of the book refers to the actual sleepwalker in the story. But it is probably also an annotation on the way so many of us live – going through the motions, but not truthfully present in the moment. Jacob never mislays the core of the familial connections; instead she refabricates the shambolic frame of family life with joy, stubbornness, personal tragedies and flashes of levity.