‘Every fiction must create an illusion of reality; and Chaudhuri’s novels succeed in doing so to an impressive degree. He has such a tender intimacy with the world and the people who inhabit it’
A Strange and Sublime Address
Amit ChaudhuriA 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.
Reviews
New York Review of Books
‘Chaudhuri’s languorous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to put in any category at all’
Salman Rushdie
‘This evocation of the routine, quotidian magic of normality strikes me as an extraordinary thing to have brought off... mesmerizing’
VogueJohn Lanchester
