What happens when one attempts to exchange the life one is given for something better? Can we transform the possibilities we are born into? A State of Freedom prises open the central, defining events of our century - displacement and migration - but not as you imagine them. Five characters, in very different circumstances - from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city - find out the meanings of dislocation, intended or enforced, and the desire for more. In this novel of multiple narratives, set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, Neel Mukherjee delivers a devastating and haunting vision of a people defined by that most unquenchable of human urges, the striving for a different life. Formally daring, fierce but full of pity, A State of Freedom asks the fundamental question: how does one imagine the ways one can live in the world?