Friend of My Youth: Amit Chaudhuri - Hardcover

Chaudhuri, Amit

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571337597 ISBN 13: 9780571337590

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2017

Synopsis

In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on his mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit's last remaining connection to the city he once called home.

Amit Chaudhuri's new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, 'Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.'

About this title

Review

Amit Chaudhuri is a master. This book is a hymn to a city, to our present and our past. Like an Indian Proust, he shows us the enchantments and powers of memory. To read Amit Chaudhuri is to discover that one's heart is beating at a gentler, more profound pace. In today's noisy world, his words provide a home wherein we can contemplate the essential things in life. -- Nadeem Aslam

What [Chaudhuri] does in this short novel, with exquisite delicacy, is show disconnection, vacancy and the physical world's imperviousness to human action, even of the most violent kind., Esquire

Friend of My Youth is a taut, efficient book: part novel and part manifesto. It presents itself as a work of fiction about friendship, the experiences of youth and the city of Mumbai, but really it's a kind of anti-novel: a book about the failures of fiction to account for the realities of memory, Guardian

Chaudhuri is an exceptionally subtle writer, a sceptical seeker rather than a postmodern show-off. However you classify it, this journey through the traces of his past earns its literary sleight-of-hand., Spectator

This novel is "an assemblage of moments, of different kinds of awareness of the world, and even of writing". Like [Henry] Green's novels it offers delight, it shimmers, you seek to catch hold of it and it slides away., Scotsman

Fiercely intelligent [and] elegant . [Chaudhuri] combines a serious reflection on psychology and friendship with an examination of the artist's relationship to real life., The Herald

Book Description

'Amit Chaudhuri has, like Proust, perfected the art of the moment. [he] 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

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0571337597
• ISBN 13: 9780571337590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176