by Manjushree Thapa
Recommended by Farzana Doctor
Ava Berriden, a Canadian lawyer, quits her corporate job in Toronto to move to Nepal, from where she was adopted as a baby. There she struggles to adapt to her new career in international aid and forge a connection with the country of her birth.
Ava’s work brings her into contact with Indira Sharma, who has ambitions of becoming the first Nepali woman director of an NGO; Sapana Karki, a bright young teenager living in a small village; and Gyanu, Sapana’s brother, who has returned home from Dubai to settle his sister’s future after their father’s death. Their journeys collide in unexpected ways.
All of Us in Our Own Lives is a stunning, keenly observant novel about human interconnectedness, about privilege, and about the ethics of international aid (the earnestness and idealism and yet its cynical, moneyed nature).
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About the Author
Manjushree Thapa
Manjushree Thapa grew up in Nepal, Canada, and the United States. She began to write upon completing her BFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her first book was Mustang Bhot in Fragments (1992). In 2001 she published the novel The Tutor of History, which she had begun as her MFA thesis in the creative writing program at the University of Washington in Seattle, which she attended as a Fulbright scholar. Her translation of Indra Bahadur Rai’s There’s a Carnival Today won 2017 PEN America Heim Translation Grant. Her best-known book is Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2005), published just weeks before the royal coup in Nepal on 1 February 2005. The book was shortlisted for the Lettre Ulysses Award in 2006.
Before she became a writer she was the project manager of the Annapurna Conservation Area Project’s office in Lo Monthang, Mustang, and as the Picture Editor of Himal in Kathmandu. During this time she was witness to the revolution in political consciousness that followed Nepal’s transition to democracy in 1990. Her early experience in Nepal has informed much of her later writing.
Manjushree received a Master of Fine Arts in English (Fiction) at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied with Maya Sonenberg, Shawn Wong, David Shields, and Charles Johnson. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and a high school degree from National Cathedral School in Washington, DC.
She was born in Kathmandu and raised in Nepal, Canada, and the United States. Her family also lived in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Switzerland, and India at various periods. She lives in Toronto.
