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“... Bishu had lived in Calcutta for eight years, but still couldn’t speak proper Bengali. ‘I does my work,’ or ‘I am tell him not to do that,’ he would say. Even so, he courted his wife in precisely this language and then married her. With his child he either spoke in Oriya or his version of Bengali, and the child, now a year and a half old, did not seem to mind ...”

“... He had come back in April, the aftermath of the lawsuit and court proceedings in two countries still fresh, the voices echoing behind him. But he felt robust. ‘Here,’ he said to the taxi driver that day in April – it was a Tuesday – when he arrived. His son was staring out of the window, as if the taxi were a most natural place to be in, apparently unaffected by its rusting window-edges and its noise ...”

“... driven by a frantic ambition to include within their pages all of India and all of its history. In Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, however, not much happens, although even this is a good deal more than in either of his first two novels. A Strange and Sublime Address records memories of childhood trips with his parents to stay with his aunt and uncle in ...”

“... Amit Chaudhuri​ visited Europe for the first time at the age of eleven. In 1973 the world felt steady; it had ‘a kind of wholeness to it’. The co-existence of capitalism and communism seemed permanent. Forty years later, visiting Berlin, he felt the need ‘to grasp fleetingly, what one had lost’. He had grown up in non-aligned India, which balanced democratic commitment with a sympathy for the Soviet Union, and his sense of ‘what it meant to be human’ was formed by the Cold War’s antitheses ...”

“... dazed, astray, wide of the mark’ (early 19th century). All of them are present in the title of Amit Chaudhuri’s intelligent and funny new novel, which follows a young Bengali man and his uncle on their uneventful wanderings around London on a mid-1980s summer’s day. Homer and Joyce are clearly present, too, but Ananda isn’t impressed by ...”

“... for flying visits home, they didn’t come back. Like all who return to the city from abroad, Amit Chaudhuri is well versed in the melancholy laments of Calcutta’s decline. Now the author of five novels, a musician and poet, Chaudhuri approaches his chronicle of the city of his birth with a practised ...”

“... Freud’s refusal to put Rilke on the couch. But Derrida’s writings are a different matter, as Amit Chaudhuri came to recognise in the course of writing the Oxford doctoral thesis on which this study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry is based. Chaudhuri, who has written here a work of both theory and close reading, finds ...”

“... bus or a rendezvous in a café is the closest we are likely to come to adventure; enormous because Chaudhuri has once again turned this unspectacular material into something enchanting, studded with moments of beauty more arresting than anything to be found in a hundred busier and more excitable narratives. Part of the reader’s exhilaration, for that ...”

“... which involves social comment, Michael Dibdin should tilt the balance the other way next time. Is Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address concerned with the Condition of India Question? The eight short sketches that make up the last third of the book might give this impression. They are about a Calcutta where power cuts are frequent, the TV ...”

“... on all that would follow. And this is precisely the problem for the three main characters in Amit Chaudhuri’s fifth novel. All lead largely happy and prosperous lives in late 20th-century Bombay, but all are haunted by the examples of their elders, by ideals of Hindustani classical music, shastriya sangeet; by legendary singers, flawless ...”

“... Lola prefers Wodehouse and Trollope, the books confiscated from her sister Noni are a novel by Amit Chaudhuri, and a translation of an account of police brutality by Mahashveta Devi, a Bengali fiction writer and activist. Desai here suggests the wealth – and confusion – of Noni’s opportunities as an Indian reader, and the intricacy of her own ...”

“... is Hollywood with its images of terror and frightening rhetoric of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Amit Chaudhuri Calcutta It is one thing to believe without knowing, quite another to know without believing. Never have world-shattering events been so relentlessly documented, the evidence of testimony converging with the hideous evidence of things. Yet I ...”

“... here are trying to see beyond an antithetical model of East-West relations to one in which, as Amit Chaudhuri has written, ‘the Orient, in modernity, is not only a European invention but also an Oriental one.’ Srinivas Aravamudan brings in Said’s later concept of the ‘travelling’ text, from his 1983 study The World, the Text and the Critic ...”

“... Eimear McBride, Alan Hollinghurst; but also, in an important postcolonial modification, Naipaul, Amit Chaudhuri, Zia Haider Rahman. We were Hardy’s heirs, without quite knowing it; Mark Ford has located the ...”

“... as an odalisque, fanned by attendants with peacock feathers. (The Orient has its own Orient, as Amit Chaudhuri once remarked.) I used to wear a sari my father bought me; it was sprigged with tiny flowers in pale pink on a lighter shade of primrose; he also gave me a Chinese mandarin’s robe with writhing dragons embroidered in golden gimp. They were ...”