Product Description

When Frank and Ellie Benton lose their only child, seven-year-old Benny, to a sudden illness, the perfect life they had built is shattered. Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. But an unexpected job half a world away offers them an opportunity to start again. Life in Girbaug, India, holds promise—and peril—when Frank befriends Ramesh, a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of the grieving man's attentions. Haunted by memories of his dead son, Frank is consumed with making his family right—a quest that will lead him down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions.

Filled with satisfyingly real characters and glowing with local color, The Weight of Heaven is a rare glimpse of a family and a country struggling under pressures beyond their control. In a devastating look at cultural clashes and divides, Umrigar illuminates how slowly we recover from unforgettable loss, how easily good intentions can turn evil, and how far a person will go to build a new world for those he loves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84060 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Released on: 2009-04-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061472541
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In the years following the sudden death of their seven-year-old son, Benny, Michigan residents Frank and Ellie Benton have witnessed the steady deterioration of their marriage. So when Frank’s boss offers him a position overseeing a company factory in the rural Indian city of Girbaug, Ellie convinces her husband it’s just the change they both need. From the start, Ellie, a therapist, basks in her new life, making friends with townspeople and volunteering her services at a nearby clinic. But Frank’s work brings endless grief. His company, Herbal Solutions, has taken over land containing trees that locals have long harvested for their medicinal properties. (One Girbaug resident is so despondent over his loss of income, he takes his own life.) Frank’s world brightens when he befriends Ramesh, the charming, inquisitive son of the Bentons’ housekeeper and cook. Ramesh soon becomes a surrogate for Benny in a relationship that simultaneously boosts Frank’s spirits and breaks his heart. Umrigar (First Darling of the Morning, 2008) renders melancholy novels that resonate with rich prose and vibrant depictions of India, where she spent the first 21 years of her life before moving to the States. The Weight of Heaven is a bold, beautifully rendered tale of cultures that clash and coalesce. --Allison Block

Review
"Umrigar beautifully illuminates how human relationships are complicated by cultural, geographical, and class divides." (More Magazine )

About the Author

Thrity Umrigar is the author of three other novels—The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time—and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for seventeen years, she is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and a 2006 finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. An associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, Umrigar lives in Cleveland.

Customer Reviews

Deeply Moving
I discovered Thrity Umrigar in 2008, and she has since become a favorite author of mine. I felt honored to have received an advance copy of her new book: The Weight of Heaven, published by Harper Collins.

In her new novel we meet Frank and Ellie Benton, a grief stricken couple from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who have just lost their seven year old son Benny, after a short illness. Unable to cope with this horrific loss, Frank accepts a new assignment running a factory, Herbal Solutions, in Girbaug, India, a coastal village near Bombay.

Unfortunately, the factory and its Third World workers are in the midst of a labor dispute over low wages. Frank calls the workers "lazy", and his wife sees the workers as justified. Ellie sides with the workers, suggesting that Frank give them a few "rupees" to make them feel like they "won". Even in India, Frank and Ellie are conflicted. Frank has difficulties understanding why his workers don't act like his workers did in America. This additional conflict only adds to the pain he is still experiencing in India over the loss of his son. Ellie on the other hand sees her new surroundings as an opportunity to help the less fortunate women in the village (she is a psychologist/therapist), and believes there is so much to teach these poor women that she sees at a local health clinic. She is determined to not let grief define her life, because she believes her son would not have wanted that.

Frank before long begins to find some comfort tutoring Ramesh, the young son of the couple's housekeeper. The boy is very bright and eager to learn. Before long, his interest in helping the boy becomes an obsession and new conflicts arise between Frank and Prakash, the boy's resentful, bitter, father. Frank will do anything to keep that bright and personable boy close by, no matter what it takes.

The Weight of Heaven is a hauntingly beautiful story about cultural divides and misunderstandings. It is a story about loss and working through grief, and one of those rare books that forces you as the reader to take stock of your life, and to think about the things that really matter most. The ending is shocking, but in some strange way--- wonderful. I am happy to say that this is one of those rare books, that left an imprint with me long after the final page was turned. There are so many beautiful passages that I found myself reading over and over again; a true gem. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

DO NOT MISS THIS ONE!

"A place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs."
Thrity Umrigar has a distinctive capacity for presenting the unsettling impact of Anglo-Indian cross-cultural relations. In this novel she centers on a young American couple currently living in India and assesses the collateral damage and the heartbreaking fallout of the sudden death of their seven-year-old son. Frank Benton and his wife Ellie are on assignment in Girbaug, India, for NaturalSolutions, a multinational herbal remedy company. The discovery of a forest containing girbal leaves that HerbalSolutions now harvest and process in order to use as an alternative treatment to control diabetes are increasing the company's profits ten-fold, and consequently unexpected financial opportunities have appeared for Frank and his boss and best friend Pete Timberlake. HerbalSolutions has signed a fifty year lease to lease the thousands of acres of forest from the Indian state government. The local villagers, who have traditionally brewed, chewed, and even smoked the leaves of the girbal tree, are however, resist to the demands of the company, their troubled economy relying heavily on the trees.

The stage is now set as Umrigar begins her lyrical tale even as she counterbalances the death of a popular union leader and the germinating a labor dispute that begins to germinate with that of the devastating personal tragedy of Frank and Ellie, and their son Benny now gone, only his memories left behind "mocking their earlier smug happiness. Ellie tries to see India as a fresh start, a chance to save their troubled marriage, to start clean in a new place and the possibility of banishing their once Edenic life in Ann Arbor Michigan. In reality though, the move does little to assuage the couple's Ellie's bitterness and unspoken accusations. When the dark-haired, sharp-eyed Indian boy Ramesh, the "sunshine to Benny's moonlight" the son of Frank and Ellie's cook comes into their lives, Frank notices his heart awaken once again to all the proclivities of paternal love. The two form a bond, Ramesh rapidly becoming the only thing in Frank's life that can give him any solace and any sense of normalcy in this chaotic country

Ramesh's mother Edna is secretly thrilled at the prospect of her son being mentored by the wealthy Americans, but it is her drunken husband Prakash who threatens to derail Ramesh's new-found friendship. Living in a ramshackle hut just across the courtyard from the Benton's estate, Prakash spends much of his time seething with bitter jealousy, similarly envious, ashamed, and even obtuse to the point of blindness in matters involving the welfare of his son. In a turning of a giant spiritual wheel, Umrigar's vast, sweeping patch worked landscape is filled with small and intimate moments, as the frailty of human need and grief is made all too real, Prakash plotting revenge, Ellie's anxious need to save her troubled marriage, and Ramesh buoyed along by the hopes of a life in the United States. In desperation, Frank sets himself on an amoral path of destruction, caught up in his overwrought obsessions over the Indian boy, a disease of the soul, and of love, as Ramesh becomes his brightest star, "his sun without which his future looked barren and dark."

Meanwhile, the cacophony of India abounds, the songs and phrases and the sites, sounds and smells. Umrigar's chaotic country is filled overlapping images even as she weighs the notions of fate and destiny, good verses evil, all of her characters burdened by the awful weight of heaven. Her account of Frank and Ellie's innocent courtship in Ann Arbor half way through is quite beautiful, along with their sudden decent into heartache even as the graven images of them clustered at Benny's bedside seem all to much to tolerate. While the innocent Ramesh is caught up in the selfish needs of two men - in a classic struggle of two cultures - Ellie and Edna try to reach out to the men, desperate for them to see reason. Frank however, unwittingly sabotages all of their lives at every turn, the fragility of their existence in India put to a final test by a reckless decision. In a heart-stopping ending, Umrigar conveys a startling lesson, the sin of hubris carried to the extreme in the form of an appalling crime, which in turn changes Frank's life and the lives of Ramesh and Prakash forever. Mike Leonard April 09

A COMPELLING STORY OF LOVE AND LOSS
Surely one of life's most devastating experiences is the loss of a child. Some practitioners say it is a loss from which one cannot ever completely recover. Others say not so. What most will agree is that each person responds to tragedy in a different way. Such is certainly the case with Frank and Ellie Benton in Thrity Umriger's intensely emotional The Weight Of Heaven.

A young American couple, Frank and Ellie lost their seven-year-old son, Benny, to a mysterious illness. It was quite unexpected, absolutely heartbreaking and, in their case, polarizing. Frank is unable to explain what happened to him. Following Benny's funeral he felt he should go to Ellie and say something brave and consoling. But, he did not know how. It was if she were a stranger. He equates his marriage to a book he had read in high school and Ellie a character in it that he had forgotten. They are surrounded only by memories, recollections that mock them - a mug that says #1 Mom, a small baseball glove.

Not too long after Benny's death Frank's boss asks him if he wants to head a new factory the company is building in Girbaug, India. Frank declines saying it is not a good time for him to relocate. But, when Ellie hears about the offer she insists that they go, seeing the move as a new start and, most importantly, an opportunity to salvage their marriage and their once shared happiness.

Thus, a clash of cultures and ideas begins. Frank at first looks down on the small city and its inhabitants. But eventually he is drawn to Ramesh, the nine-year-old son of their housekeepers, almost to the point of seeing him as a surrogate son. This was not at all in Ellie's plan but she feels there is little she can do.

Grief recovery can be a long, painful process; Umriger deftly paints this journey with deft and understanding pen. She is an extraordinary writer; The Weight Of Heaven merits not only attention but accolades as well.

- Gail Cooke