Sam Mukherjee received an M.A. in History from Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India, and studied mass communication at Holmesglen Institute of TAFE in Melbourne, Australia. He attended the Vancouver Film School where he studied screenwriting. Mukherjee now lives in Toronto where he is a senior writer with Globalom Media and writes speeches for the Canadian Senator Asha Seth. His third novel, The Perfect Tangerine, will be published in Mumbai, India by Leadstart Publications in the summer of 2013.
Fiction
Chopped Green Chillies in Vanilla Ice Cream
Kolkata, India: Rupa & Co., 2011.
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
Chinmoy Bose, a slightly overweight adolescent is uprooted from his beloved humble neighbourhood in Kolkata when his parents land upon an unexpected win at a lottery. Childhood friends are distanced and school ceases to be vernacular. The despondent teenager arrives at the uppity Vanilla Apartments where he meets the best friends of his life and acquires the nickname, Tiger. He savors every single day of his newfound existence with four spirited boys, Kirit, Robin, Signal and Pluto. Vanilla Apartments is a multistoried behemoth of white cement that resembles a massive block of vanilla ice cream. It houses misfits and wannabes and islands and archipelagos. Quidnuncs and vamps complete the equation. Their spicy lives are like chopped green chillies in vanilla ice cream and there is never a dull day in the high-rise. Tiger’s journey with his friends is full of admiration as well as controversies. He nurtures the dream of going to America one day. Will a surprising betrayal short-circuit his life’s ambition or can he emerge victorious from the set back?
Fiction
In the Name of Love: A Novel
Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education, 2012.
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
In the Name of Love is a thriller about the sex slave trade chock full of believable, well-developed compelling characters. Two women are the central focus of the novel – the one an unscrupulous criminal, the other her victim. Rimana, a young Indian woman, is thrilled to be headhunted by a company in Canada and pleased to escape her mother’s expectations of marriage. On the flight to Canada she meets Jug, a young Canadian man whose mother was Indian, and by the time they arrive in Toronto they are well on their way to falling in love. When Rimana doesn’t contact Jug after arrival he begins to worry that something bad has happened to her. Through a series of efforts to find her as well as one lucky coincidence, he and his two best friends, the daredevil Omar Khazana, and the over-cautious movie buff, Mark Willis, manage against all odds to rescue Rimana from the Yemeni sheik who has bought her and the traffickers who want her returned to the sheik.
Links
Publisher Inanna Publications and Education
Publisher Rupa & Co.
Sam Mukherjee personal website