AMIT CHAUDHURI

Chaudhuri's collection of stories and nonfiction pieces includes work by R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Nirmal Verma, and others--among them Rabindrinath Tagore, India's only N

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

A year after his divorce, Jayojit Chatterjee, an economics professor in the American Midwest, travels home to Calcutta with his young son, Bonny, to spend the summer holidays with his parents. Jayojit is no more accustomed to spending time alone with Bonny - who lives with his mother in California - than he is with the Admiral and his wife, whose daily rhythms have become so synchronized as to become completely foreign to their son.Together, the unlikely foursome struggles to pass the protracted hours of summer, each in his or her own way mourning Jayojits failed marriage. Written with depth and tenderness, A New World goes right to the heart of a family, making vividly alive their hopes, desires and regrets.

Set across Bombay and Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuris 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.

Khuku, a housewife, is irritated with the Muslims because their call to prayer wakes her up early every morning; her husband, a retired businessman, has been hired to cure a sick sweet factory that doesnt particularly want to be cured. Across town, Khukus brother worries about his sons affiliations with the Communist Party, but only because they may affect his ever-so-gradually coalescing marriage prospects.Freedom Song is a work of fiction that plays with big ideas while evoking the smallest aspects of everyday life with acute tenderness and extraordinary beauty.

**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.

The new novel about the present, the past, and the slippage between private and public life-from a writer who has like Proust, mastered the art of the moment. (Hilary Mantel)An unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. It is a place fused with Western history and cultural fracture lines. He moves along its streets and pavements; through its department stores, museums and restaurants. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle-he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy.Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way.

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 Amits mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amits last remaining connection to the city he once called home.

Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.Guardian1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatchers 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 mens 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.

Abhi, a Bengali boy, spends his school holidays at his uncles 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 familys 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 Chaudhuris imagination.With a foreword by Colm Toibin

**WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE**A splendid book.Literary ReviewA modern masterpiece.New York Journal of Books Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuris revelatory exploration of North Indian classical music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practises will alter the readers notion of what music might - and can - be.Through essay, memoir and cultural study, Chaudhuri dwells on the musics most distinctive and mysterious characteristics, resulting in a gift of a book for musicians and music lovers, and for any creative mind in search of diverse and transforming inspiration.Supple, intricate and uncompromising, full of delicate observation and insight. -Geoff Dyer[A] compelling meditation on Indian and Western art-making.The New Yorker

I was beginning to feel it would be best not to settle down in areas recognisably Parisian, because places recognisably themselves tend to be fictitious.A writer is invited to Paris and finds himself living in an area that bears little resemblance to his idea of the city. With the passing of time, his disquiet translates into a way of seeking and experiencing a truer, more unlikely Paris. Chateau Rouge takes up residence in that area before floating freely through the city. It takes its time, exploring tangents, diversions, side-streets, creeping into new spaces and remote angles, to open up fresh ground and appraise the city, the experience of travel, otherness - and the novel itself - anew.