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Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in New York City in 1972, 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, Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
A Play for the End of the World won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction and is long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Jai Chakrabarti is also the author of the forthcoming story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness.
“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
“Will honoring past loyalties sabotage those of the present and future? As the novel moves between Lucy in America and Jaryk in 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
The Arts + Ideas Book of the Month is a collection of books with intriguing topics, characters, and stories for book-club-style conversations that will allow the community to engage personally with some of this season’s most exciting authors. Have questions? Feel free to reach out for more information!
Hunter Thomas Director, Arts + Ideas HThomas@UJFT.org 757-965-6137
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