Chowringhee - Hardcover

Mukherji, Mani Sankar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843549131 ISBN 13: 9781843549130

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2009

Synopsis

Welcome to the Shahjahan, one of Calcutta's oldest and most venerable hotels. Its opulent suites, elegant restaurants, huddled bars and hidden backrooms teem with people, whose extraordinary stories are told by Sankar, the newest member of staff.

Sankar describes the unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, and unbidden tragedies of the people who spend their days and nights within the Shahjahan's grand façade. Like
Bengal itself, this is a place where greed, seduction and death live alongside love, luxury and pride.

With wit, warmth, and ferocious energy, Chowringhee reveals to us an entire universe. One of the great novels of contemporary Indian literature, it presents a glittering vision of a lost metropolis, and an homage to an old Bengal of myth and memory.

About this title

Review:

'Given the frenetic energy and ebullience of recent fiction coming out of India, it is something of a relief to rediscover the pleasures of an absorbing story simply told. Chowringhee has that essential quality of a good novel: the capacity to escape, and help the reader escape, time. You want to turn the pages, but you do not want the pages to end. The words are fresh, and the world of the novel is completely alive, despite being written over 40 years ago... A lovely, charming book brimming with life and full of the unexpectedness of a closely observed world. Everything comes to the old hotel, either to the sumptuous guest rooms or to the terrace where the staff live. Love and death are never far away. Sankar writes of both simply and movingly. There will be many grateful readers at his table' -- Guardian

`[A] terrific Bengali page-turner... [A] classic of post- and pre-independence Calcutta life... Suffice to say it's an utter treat... [Chowringhee] might, to many eyes, supply more unashamed, reader-transporting enjoyment than any other fiction of the year.'
-- Boyd Tonkin, Independent

From the Author:

Sankar - the pen-name of Mani Sankar Mukherji - is one of Bengal's most widely read modern novelists. Two of his novels, Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and JanaAranya (The Middleman) were filmed by Satyajit Ray. He lives in Kolkata (Calcutta).

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1843549131
• ISBN 13: 9781843549130
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416