The Immortals

Description

Shyamji has music in his blood, for his father was the acclaimed 'heavenly singer' and guru, Ram Lal. But Shyam Lal is not his father, and knows he never will be. Mallika Sengupta's voice could have made her famous, but being the wife of a successful businessman is a full-time occupation in itself. Mallika's son, Nirmalya, believes in suffering for his art, and for him, all compromise is failure: those with talent should be true to that talent. No matter what. Written in haunting, melodic prose, The Immortals tells the story of Shyam, Mallika and Nirmalya: their relationships, their lives, their music.

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, is a poet, a musician and a highly regarded critic. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has contributed fiction, poetry and reviews to numerous publications including the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker and Granta. Amit lives in Calcutta and Norwich.

'Chaudhuri's exquisite, highly-nuanced, often very funny novel - after all, as unfamiliar to me as NJ is to Bombay - somehow took command of my thinking, my vocabulary, my sense of what's important and what should be. This kind of surrender is rare, and is what I always seek in fiction.' -- Richard Ford 'A command performance.' -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *