Akhil Sharma's second novel, Family Life, launches in Delhi, the city of his birth, and unfolds in New York, the PEN/Hemingway Award winner's chosen home. It was 13 years in the writing, and Sharma's lengthy process resulted in a tight novel that is "a terse, devastating account of growing up as a brilliant outsider in American culture," observes the novelist Edmund White, and is "heart-stopping," according to Sonali Deraniyagala, writing in the New York Times Book Review. The Some Favorite Writers series is sponsored by the UCLA Department of English and Friends of English, and organized by Mona Simpson.