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In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on Amit's mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit's last remaining connection to the city he once called home.
In 1999, Amit Chaudhuri returned with his family to Calcutta. He did so tentatively. Calcutta was where his parents had moved after retirement; it was the city he had loved in his youth and in whose lanes he had spent tranquil childhood holidays; one he had made his name writing about. But that Calcutta had receded and another had taken its place. Calcutta is Chaudhuri’s account of two years (2009–11) in the great metropolis. Using the idea of return and the historical elections of 2011 as his fulcrum, he travels between the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, to the twenty-first century, when, utterly changed, it seems to be on the verge of another turn. Along t...
Abhi, a Bengali boy, spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta, trying to make sense of the often confusing world of adults around him. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create the shifting tectonic plates that will eventually shape the family's life. Delicate, nuanced, full of exquisite detail, A Strange and Sublime Address is also a paean to the city, with nine short stories that illustrate the world of Amit Chaudhuri's imagination. With a foreword by Colm Tóibín
Set across Bombay and Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuri's stories range from a divorcee about to enter into an arranged marriage to a teengaed poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from a singing teacher struggling to make a living out of the boredom of his students to gauche teenager desperate to hurdle past his adolescence. Rich with subtlety, elegance and deep feeling, Real Time is classic Chaudhuri.
Offers an exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to the West. This work features essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and Berlin, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, music, art and literature, politics, race, and cosmopolitanism.
A beguiling, short and yet sweeping prose-poem, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man studying at Oxford University and caught in complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail. Intensely moving, superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a testimony to the clash of the old and the new; arrivals and departures. With an introduction by James Wood
'Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.' Guardian 1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatcher's Britain, homesick and isolated. His eccentric uncle, Radhesh, is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades. Over the course of one day, Odysseus Abroad follows the two isolated men on one of their weekly forays, gradually revealing the background to the two men's lives with deft precision and humour as they traverse London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.
Such a Long Journey is set in (what was then) Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh, telling the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, and his family. It was the brilliant first novel by one of the most remarkable writers to have emerged from the Indian literary tradition in many years. It was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, and won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
**Includes a new foreword by Pankaj Mishra** Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained in the classical idiom but happily teaching more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from her mother, Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences. With quiet humor and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals is a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.
Winner Of The 2005 Kiriyama Prize For Non-Fiction Suketu Mehta Left Bombay At The Age Of 14. Twenty-One Years Later He Returned To Rediscover The City. The Result Is This Stunning, Brilliantly Illuminating Portrait Of The Megalopolis And Its People-A Book, Seven Years In The Making, That Is As Vast, As Diverse, As Rich In Experience, Incident And Sensation As The City Itself. Extraordinary . . . The Best Book Yet Written About That Great, Ruined Metropolis -Salman Rushdie Like One Of Bombay S Teeming Chawls, Maximum City Is Part Nightmare And Part Millennial Hallucination, Filled With Detail, Drama And A Richly Varied Cast Of Characters. In His Quest To Plumb Both The Grimy Depths And Radian...