Amit 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 doesn't particularly want to be cured. Across town, Khuku's brother worries about his son's affiliations with the Communist Party, but only because they may affect his...

Set across Bombay and Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuri's stories range from a divorcee about to enter into an arranged marriage to a teenaged 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 a gauche teenager desperate to hurdle past his adolescence. Rich with subtlety,...

'A mysterious, subtle, haunting novel.' - Chris Power An unnamed man arrives in Sojourn 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...

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...

'Supple, intricate and uncompromising, full of delicate observation and insight, Amit Chaudhuri's Finding the Raga immerses us in the rigorous beauty and cosmology of Indian classical music. It is also a loving memoir about relationships and places, dedication and vocation.' - Geoff Dyer By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri's singular account of his...

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 a complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail. Intensely moving and superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a testimony to the clash...

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...

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...