Château Rouge

“Chateau Rouge is a true romance. Chaudhuri’s Paris beguiles precisely by refusing to seek approval, to charm, to conform to expectations. And the same is true of this graceful novel, so stubbornly, surprisingly, gorgeously itself. On these uncharted streets and pages, a peculiar magic starts to happen. I don’t quite know how he’s done it—but I love it.” —Clare Carlisle

“[Chaudhuri’s] very measured, almost poetic prose, which evokes more than it narrates, and the austere economy of his novels, which are one fourth the size of an average Indian novel, make him distinctive: here is a painter not of large and garish Indian murals, but of portraits in miniature of everyday life.” —Pankaj Mishra, 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