The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

A Novel

By: Mira Jacob

Narrated by: Mira Jacob

Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past

“With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.”—People

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews

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.

©2014 Mira Jacob (P)2014 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Jacob’s novel is light and optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty. Jacob has created characters with evident care and treats them with gentleness even as they fight viciously with each other. Her prose is sharp and true and deeply funny. . . . This is the literary fiction I will be recommending to everyone this summer, especially those who love multigenerational, multicultural family sagas.”—Associated Press

“This debut novel so fully envelops the reader in the soul of an Indian-American immigrant family that it's heart-wrenching to part with them. . . . Thanks to Jacob’s captivating voice, which is by turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion, her characters shimmer with life. [Grade:] A-”—Entertainment Weekly

“The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is a rich, engrossing debut told with lightness and care, as smart about grief as it is about the humor required to transcend it.”—The Kansas City Star

Gateway listen!

Any additional comments?

This is the first time I've listened to a full-length fiction title. I listen to tons of podcasts, and I've listened to autobiographies and Freakonomics-style nonfiction, but never a novel. h/t to Laura Hogensen for the rec, and she was right - the author does an excellent job with the voices, and I found myself taking the long way home just so I could listen for a few extra blocks. If you've ever wondered if audiobooks are for you, this should be your gateway listen!

One of the best books I have read in a long time

I read a review after reading this book that said that the author pulls the reader into every nuance of Amina's life. The depth of character in this book is alarming and wonderful.

One of my all-time favorites!

Just finished listening to this book and it was amazing. Great story and great narration. I didn't want it to end!

One of My Top 5 Reads

This was the first audiobook that I came across and rated 5 stars across the board. The narration brings the story alive in a way that reading it from the page could never do. The story is a wonderful if not somewhat disturbing glimpse into the dynamics of a cross-cultural family. It is beautiful, and touching and real.

beautiful & delicious

Great story and best imagery. Made me want to look for the nearest Indian food restaurant!

Author's performance brings the characters to life

Mira Jacob's pitch-perfect performance of her own book brings the large cast of characters to life and breathes an intimacy and credibility into them, particularly the first generation From India, that you would not get from the printed page alone

Love the narration!

The narration on this is the best! Lyrical and it helps you feel more connected to the characters. I have lots of questions about this book so seems like it would make a good book group selection.

Terrific book

This is a fascinating immigrant story. It's a wonderful narrator. I loved this surprising book.

A family drama about love, loss and growing up

Overall I enjoyed listening to the book, but I also found it to be somewhat dragged towards the end.

The book felt very personal to the authors own experience, and has surprisingly accurate details of the South Indian immigrant experience.

A few chapters appeared to go on a completely random tangent, though a lot of it tied together well towards the end.

It takes some effort to track the timelines of the different chapters as the author keeps going back and forth. But that’s also what makes it interesting, as you see how the past and present interact. You see someone behave in a particular manner and then realize a few moments later why they are this way.

The tone of the narration felt detached and unhappy to me, and I thought it ruined it a bit for me. I enjoyed that the narrator used different voices and accents to represent the different characters. It made it more lively and easier to understand who’s speaking during back and forth conversations. At the same time, the accents were overdone and almost felt like a caricature, sounding more like Apu from the Simpsons than how they would actually sound in real life.

Albuquerque

I had no idea this story was partially set in Albuquerque, NM when I purchased it. I enjoyed the authors descriptions of life here. The cultural challenges she describes are intriguing and thought provoking. Anyone who enjoys exploring family ties will like this book.