Fatboy Fall Down: A Novel - Softcover

“Fatboy Fall Down is very, very funny about the human foibles of pride, pretension and bombast; it is searingly wise about vulnerability, the ways we let our loved ones down, how we carry hurts from childhood, how we fall from grace and try to pick ourselves back up. Orbits, whose whole life unfolds in this masterful novel, is as vivid and alive as any character I have ever encountered in fiction. I love this novel!” ― Lisa Moore

“A sad, comical tale, beautifully composed, describing the Sisyphean life-journey of a simple man on a simple island, shaped by casual cruelty and limited means.” ― MG Vassanji

“What does it mean to live a life on the margins, circling but rarely connecting with those who ‘find their place’? Rabindranath Maharaj follows this painful question through the course of one man’s life, charting the rhythms of human experience against the backdrop of a lush and corruptible world.” ― Alissa York, author of The Naturalist

A child ridiculed for his weight, a son overshadowed by a favoured brother, a husband who falls short of his wife’s ambitions, an old man with a broken heart... as Orbits’ life passes, he doggedly pursues a simple dream ― a little place in the country where a family might thrive ― while wondering if he can ever shake free of the tragedies that seem to define him. 

Fatboy Fall Down is the lush and heartbreaking musings of a man trying to understand his place in the world. Shot through with sadness and full of surprising moments of wry humour, Rabindranath Maharaj’s deft touch underscores the resilience of the human spirit.

Rabindranath Maharaj is the author of seven novels and three short story collections. His fifth novel, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, won both the Toronto Book Award and the Trillium Fiction Prize. In 2013, Maharaj was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. He resides in Ajax, Ontario.