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Amit Chaudhuri is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, is a poet, an acclaimed musician, and a highly regarded critic. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has contributed fiction, poetry and reviews to numerous publications including the Guardian, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New Yorker and Granta Magazine. Amit lives in Calcutta and Norwich.
Author photo © Geoff Pugh
Simply clever, lightly understated writing highlighting life decisions, journeys and discoveries. Step into Ananda’s world, where you feel as though you are floating freely through the confines of his mind and hearing the whispers of his innermost thoughts. Ananda is lonely and poetically trying to understand where he fits in the world of his choosing; viewing his life through his eyes, you are able to see the ties that give him strength and support. This is pure artful escapism, the author has the ability to be subtly sensitive, compassionate and yet also to wryly tease and thrust little jibes of fun. This is a book that is able to connect, to embrace and leave you at the end unable to say goodbye. ~ Liz Robinson
Simply clever, lightly understated writing highlighting life decisions, journeys and discoveries. Step into Ananda’s world, where you feel as though you are floating freely through the confines of his mind and hearing the whispers of his innermost thoughts. Ananda is lonely and poetically trying to understand where he fits in the world of his choosing; viewing his life through his eyes, you are able to see the ties that give him strength and support. This is pure artful escapism, the author has the ability to be subtly sensitive, compassionate and yet also to wryly tease and thrust little jibes of fun. This is a book that is able to connect, to embrace and leave you at the end unable to say goodbye. ~ Liz Robinson
Float and wander through a story where an everyday beginning, middle and end, becomes a world transformed. The author sets you adrift, starts to bring your attention to an occasion or individual and then sets a song or a description of a room to capture your thoughts and send them elsewhere. Giving a real insight into a certain sphere of life in India during the 80’s, we are also allowed a fleeting glimpse of some of the numerous people required to make this particular household function. Occasionally you may need to research certain words to understand their meaning and context in this tale of family life. The author has the ability to open your eyes, to reveal the hidden, to encourage you to look for the connections in this delightfully whimsical yet satisfying read. ~ Liz Robinson
Skilfull and delicate writing where the commonplace is described in such a way, you feel as though you are seeing it for the first time. Chaudhuri takes a peek at an everyday normality and describes it with such simplicity, compassion and beauty that it becomes a little shaft of pure sunlight. It almost feels as though you have stepped into someone's mind and danced through their innermost thoughts as they whimsically drift from Oxford to India. It is perhaps India that stands out as a highlight, with it’s exotic yet homely reflections creating memories to live for. A quite lovely and enchanting little book. ~ Liz Robinson
Ranging over place, memory and history, Amit Chaudhuri's new collection of poems makes a fresh, spiritual accommodation with the world. The poems often take their themes from sweets named and eaten, meals remembered, and matches these with meditations on culture, people, time and identity that slowly unfold as much in the mouth as in the mind. And what we discover are the hesitations, assessments and uncertainties that finally make us fully human. Those quiet moments of revelation and rediscovery that create our lives as much as reflect their circumstances, locating and healing us in their intimate pleasures.
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 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 his 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. Amit Chaudhuri's new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, 'Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.'
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 this highly acclaimed novel, Amit Chaudhuri tells us the story of one unremarkable July day in 1980s London. Ananda, student of poetry, is lonely, and somewhat fraught, as he grapples with the big questions of literature. His uncle, Radhesh, a bachelor leading an early retired life in a Belsize Park bedsit, is self-involved, eccentric. On this day, they find uncertain companionship as they circle around their past and take stock of their place in the city. Ananda and Radhesh both provide a foil to each other and yet remain apart, as Chaudhuri shows why he is considered his generation s best chronicler of acutely observed life.
Amit Chaudhuri's stories range across the astonishing face of the modern Indian subcontinent. From divorcees about to enter into an arranged marriage to the teenaged poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from singing teachers to housewives to white-collar businessmen, Real Time deftly explores the juxtaposition of the new and old worlds in his native India. Here are stories as sweet and ironic as they are deft and revealing.
A Strange and Sublime Address, Amit Chaudhuris first book, features a Bengali boy who spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create a shifting background to the shaping of people's lives. Delicate, nuanced, full of exquisite detail, A Strange and Sublime Address is a small masterpiece. The book also includes nine short stories about the city.
In this beautiful collection, Amit Chaudhuri's stories range from a divorcee about to enter into an arranged marraige to a teengaed poet who develops a relationship with a lonely windower, 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. Ripe with subtlety, elegance and deep feeling, this is vintage Chaudhuri.
In this beautiful collection, 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. Ripe with subtlety, elegance and deep feeling, this is vintage Chaudhuri.
A Strange and Sublime Address, Amit Chaudhuri's first book, features a Bengali boy who spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create a shifting background to the shaping of people's lives. Delicate, nuanced, full of exquisite detail, A Strange and Sublime Address is a small masterpiece. The book also includes nine short stories about the city.
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 Bonnywho lives with his mother in Californiathan 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.
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 ever-so-gradually coalescing marriage prospects. Freedom Song is vintage Amit Chaudhuri, playing with big ideas while evoking the smallest aspects of everyday life with acute tenderness and extraordinary beauty.
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 Jayojit's 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.
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 ever-so-gradually coalescing marriage prospects. Freedom Song is vintage Amit Chaudhuri, playing with big ideas while evoking the smallest aspects of everyday life with acute tenderness and extraordinary beauty.
In the early 1980s, a young Indian boy Ananda comes to London to study English. Hes shy and sensitive; he wants to become a famous poet. In London, among his white-faced fellow British students, Ananda feels out of place. Terminally lonely, he reads, he wanders the streets, he tries to adjust to being an outsider.Also in London is Anandas uncle, a debonair, anorexic bachelor in his sixties whose childhood genius and potential has been dashed and deflated. Having been made redundant from his job, Rangamama lives in a bedsit in Hampstead, hording plastic bags from Bugdens, endlessly torturing himself with thoughts about a promotion he never received and obsessing about his bowel movements. A virgin, Rangamama is an eccentric loner a foil to what the young Ananda fears he may become.Over the course of one day, the novel traces the movements of Ananda as he leaves his student lodgings and makes his way up to his uncles house and the diverse events that befall them. A brilliant exposition of loneliness, failure and the experience of living as a foreigner abroad in Thatchers Britain by one of our most internationally acclaimed writers, as well as a love letter to Ulysses, this is a strikingly original, deep and beautiful novel.
Described as a felicitous prose poem, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man who is 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 perfect miniature of a novel about arrivals and departures, new worlds and old homes.
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