Amit Chaudhuri is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including The Immortals, A Strange and Sublime Address, Freedom Song and A New World which – between them – have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Sahitya Akademi Award. His most recent novel is Odysseus Abroad. He is also a poet, an acclaimed musician, a highly regarded critic, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was awarded the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the humanities in literary studies. He lives in Calcutta and Norwich.

PRAISE FOR AFTERNOON RAAG

‘Those who are always acclaiming the “poetic prose” of Ondaatje would do well to study Chaudhuri’s language.’

James Wood, Guardian

‘Chaudhuri is a miniaturist, for whom tiny moments become radiant, and for whom the complexities of the fleeting mood uncurl onto the page like a leaf, a petal.’

Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books

‘Nothing is too small or boring for [Chaudhuri]: 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, 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

‘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