Freedom Song

“Chaudhuri writes about India like no one else.” —Robert McCrum, Observer

“Amit Chaudhuri evokes the background noises of Calcutta so effectively that even for a reader who has never set foot on the sub-continent there is an eerily realistic effect.” —Penelope Lively, Spectator 

“The narrative flits from mind to mind, flashes forward and back, finding a great and casual beauty at the edge of the haphazard.” —Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

“Fiction very different from the kind being written by other Indians…Chaudhuri is interested in the life each of us leads that no one else knows about.” —Richard Cronin, London Review of Books

“It takes us further ‘towards a home in the heart’ than Chaudhuri has before. Its final, subtly elegiac section reveals Chaudhuri’s overriding concern: the slow unfolding of personal trajectories around the pages of national narrative.” —Independent

“Chaudhuri is a poet’s novelist, not just in the sensibility but in technique. All this, employing a language that is balletic—slow and artful, and at the same time, arresting and precise.” —The Guardian

“Breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations, comic set pieces and melancholy grace notes.” —New York Times Book Review

“This novel is one of the closest and most luminous illustrations of ‘still life’ I have seen in contemporary fiction. Here is a world so ‘still’ that the reader expects it to collapse at any moment from the explosion or from some internal combustion of violence. And it is this gap between the reader’s expectation and the novelist’s refusal to fulfill it that gives Chaudhuri’s narrative both energy and a rare kind of tranquillity.” —Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books

“What makes itself felt most abruptly in Chaudhuri’s fiction is not what happens by way of plot but the change in tone: romance is quickly, repeatedly, unrelentingly deflated.” —Saikat Majumdar, Los Angeles Review of Books