Afternoon Raag

“Those who are always acclaiming the ‘poetic prose’ of Ondaatje would do well to study Chaudhuri’s language.” —James Wood, The Guardian

“Amit Chaudhuri has, like Proust, perfected the art of the moment. . . . [His novels] were masterpieces of intimate observation: their narratives slight, their manner rich and lyrical. In Afternoon Raag, a student at Oxford . . . stood poised between two worlds; should he cling to his ‘Indianness’ and the richness of childhood memory, or should he let that world slide away from him and embrace his future?” —Hilary Mantel, The New York Review of Books

“Chaudhuri has only one of the novelist’s qualifications, but he has it in abundance . . . he is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally. Nothing is too small or too boring for him: he defamiliarises the everyday, reinvigorates the ordinary, and makes the humdrum seem exciting.” —Jonathan Coe, London Review of Books

“Nothing at all seems to happen, in the most beautifully modulated way.” —Anne Enright, The Guardian, Anne Enright’s Top 10 Slim Volumes 

“Like Van Gogh, he can invest the bed and chairs of an exile’s room with a radiant life of their own…He’s a sublime impressionist.” —Boyd Tonkin, New Statesman

“Chaudhuri’s idea of the novel as a collection of poetic musings is also displayed in his sensitivity to minute detail and his ability to transform the quotidian and the seemingly insignificant into the matter of intense reflection.” —Times Literary Supplement