Books by Amit Chaudhuri

'Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.' Guardian1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatcher's Britain, homesick and isolated. His eccentric uncle, Radhesh, is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades. Over the course of one day, Odysseus Abroad follows the two isolated men on one of their weekly forays, gradually revealing the background to the two men's lives with deft precision and humour as they traverse London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.

A beguiling, short and yet sweeping prose-poem, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man studying at Oxford University and caught in complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail. Intensely moving, superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a testimony to the clash of the old and the new; arrivals and departures.With an introduction by James Wood

Amit Chaudhuri's new collection of poems makes a fresh, spiritual accommodation with the world. The poems often take their themes from sweets named and eaten, meals remembered, and matches these with meditations on culture, people, time and identity that slowly unfold as much in the mouth as in the mind.

Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the Humanities in Literary Studies Rabindranath Tagore is widely regarded as a romantic poet, speaking of beauty and truth; as a transcendentalist; a believer in the absolute; a propagandist for universal man; and as a national icon. But, as Amit Chaudhuri shows in these remarkable and widely admired essays about the poet and his milieu, his secret concern was really with life, play, and contingency, with the momentary as much as it was with the eternal. It is this strain of unacknowledged modernism, as well as a revolutionary life-affirming vision, that gives his work, Chaudhuri argues, its immense power. Acute, challenging, and path-breaking, Amit Chaudhuri's collection will become a classic reading of Rabindranath Tagore and the way he is perceived today. On Tagore was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar, the West Bengal government's highest literary honour, in 2012 in recognition of the 'significance, in the English language, of its critical analysis of Tagore's works'.