A newly divorced professor returns home to Calcutta and contends with his disconnection from his son, his parents, and life itself in this atmospheric, lushly descriptive novel of loss and the difficulty of continuing on in spite of it.
A New World is a tale of a man recovering from a difficult divorce and a story about the way we live now. Set in the 1990s, the book describes a world become, in the wake of the Cold War, more international and interconnected in which, at the same time, connection has grown ever more tenuous and harder to sustain. Jayojit, born and bred in India, is a professor of economics at a college in the American Midwest. His ex-wife has moved to California, taking their young son, Bonny, with her. For summer vacation, Jayojit has brought Bonny to Calcutta to visit his mother and father, a retired admiral in the Indian navy. The heat of summer has moved in when the two arrive; the monsoon will come before they leave. During the course of this stay, Jayojit will brood over the past and try to imagine the future, while enduring the inconveniences and misunderstandings and absurdities of family life and occasionally venturing out, alone or with Bonny, to explore the changing landscape of the city. Present throughout Chaudhuri's pages are questions central to life and to the life of the novel: What is freedom and what is responsibility? What, beyond the commotion of the moment, are the commonalities that bind us together?
"Unbelievably beautiful; I like to dip in and out, a few pages at a time, letting the words nurture me." —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"A literary landmark, a superb study of dislocation." —Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
“Chaudhuri’s beautiful third novel offers delicate tableaux vivants.... What most distinguishes A New World is not is narrative contours, but its repose. It is a gentle book of tremendous patience and sensitivity.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Among the literary voices from Indian to have made themselves heard over the past ten years, Amit Chaudhuri’s is one of the quietest but most impressive.... [A] beautifully balanced, affecting, truthful book.” —Sunday Telegraph
“Mr. Chaudhuri holds our attention with unobtrusive evocation of place, texture, and humanity.... He is capable of producing that quicksilver compound of recognition and surprise, which is, of course, what so often distinguishes art.” —The Economist
“Chaudhuri...has as much of life in each of his books as many of his contemporaries will capture in a career...At times, reading some of these passages, you can be reminded of reading Joyce's Dubliners for the first time, where every sentence can seem a small act of beauty." —Tim Adams, The Observer
Amit Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has written several works of fiction, a critical study of the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, and edited The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. Among the many awards he has received are the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also a musician.
View titles by Amit Chaudhuri
A newly divorced professor returns home to Calcutta and contends with his disconnection from his son, his parents, and life itself in this atmospheric, lushly descriptive novel of loss and the difficulty of continuing on in spite of it.
A New World is a tale of a man recovering from a difficult divorce and a story about the way we live now. Set in the 1990s, the book describes a world become, in the wake of the Cold War, more international and interconnected in which, at the same time, connection has grown ever more tenuous and harder to sustain. Jayojit, born and bred in India, is a professor of economics at a college in the American Midwest. His ex-wife has moved to California, taking their young son, Bonny, with her. For summer vacation, Jayojit has brought Bonny to Calcutta to visit his mother and father, a retired admiral in the Indian navy. The heat of summer has moved in when the two arrive; the monsoon will come before they leave. During the course of this stay, Jayojit will brood over the past and try to imagine the future, while enduring the inconveniences and misunderstandings and absurdities of family life and occasionally venturing out, alone or with Bonny, to explore the changing landscape of the city. Present throughout Chaudhuri's pages are questions central to life and to the life of the novel: What is freedom and what is responsibility? What, beyond the commotion of the moment, are the commonalities that bind us together?
Reviews
"Unbelievably beautiful; I like to dip in and out, a few pages at a time, letting the words nurture me." —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"A literary landmark, a superb study of dislocation." —Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
“Chaudhuri’s beautiful third novel offers delicate tableaux vivants.... What most distinguishes A New World is not is narrative contours, but its repose. It is a gentle book of tremendous patience and sensitivity.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Among the literary voices from Indian to have made themselves heard over the past ten years, Amit Chaudhuri’s is one of the quietest but most impressive.... [A] beautifully balanced, affecting, truthful book.” —Sunday Telegraph
“Mr. Chaudhuri holds our attention with unobtrusive evocation of place, texture, and humanity.... He is capable of producing that quicksilver compound of recognition and surprise, which is, of course, what so often distinguishes art.” —The Economist
“Chaudhuri...has as much of life in each of his books as many of his contemporaries will capture in a career...At times, reading some of these passages, you can be reminded of reading Joyce's Dubliners for the first time, where every sentence can seem a small act of beauty." —Tim Adams, The Observer
Author
Amit Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has written several works of fiction, a critical study of the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, and edited The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. Among the many awards he has received are the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also a musician.
View titles by Amit Chaudhuri
