A house divided

A family’s unravelling told through a teenage son’s eyes, Basanta Basnet’s ‘Simsara’ is a haunting tale of love, loss, and resilience.

Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’, a romantic tragedy set in 19th-century tsarist Russia, opens with a timeless declaration: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This sentiment encapsulates the central theme of Basanta Basnet’s Nepali novel, ‘Simsara’, which explores the emotional turmoil of a dysfunctional family in Nepal’s eastern hills.