Afternoon Raag (R/J)

Amit Chaudhuri’s highly acclaimed novel now in a new superbly designed paperback format. Selling Points: Winner of the Society of Authors’ Encore Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Prix de la Société des gens de letters. ‘Those who are always acclaiming the “poetic prose” of Ondaatje would do well to study Chaudhuri’s language. Again and again, he produces the perfect adjective, the stupendous adverb radiantly exact’—James Wood, Guardian. The Book: 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. Review of Books ‘Nothing at all seems to happen, in the most beautifully modulated way’. Anne Enright, in her choice of her top 10 short novels, Guardian ‘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 and Society. Read more