"In this absorbing and moving ethnography of aspiration and the deaths in its midst, Jocelyn Chua takes on the deeply contextual yet starkly human question of what makes life livable. Offering careful insight into what suicide can tell us about the precariousness and disenchantment of modern life, she unpacks the ways suicide undermines, even as it authorizes, triumphal narratives of development.  In the process, her deft and incisive account of life, love and medicine in south India portrays not only the stakes of modernity, but the high – and unevenly distributed - stakes of the idea that modernity and aspiration are to blame for suffering."—Sarah Pinto, author of Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India

"Chua makes a tragic and compelling case for Kerala’s transformation from a paragon of development into India’s suicide capital. Combining moving explorations of childrearing, labor migration, and clinical intervention with meticulous anthropological scholarship, In Pursuit of the Good Life reveals development as a literally life-and-death matter, provoking both soaring aspirations and fatal disappointments.”—Anand Pandian, associate professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India