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Biographical note
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, including Sojourn and Friend of My Youth, as well as three books of essays, three books of poems, a collection of short stories and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence's poetry. He has received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the LA Times Book Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 until 2021, and he is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University. He edits literaryactivism.com. He is a vocalist in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a celebrated project that brings together different musical traditions. Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music won the James Tait Black Prize in 2022.'A mysterious, subtle, haunting novel.'
Chris Power
An unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. It is a place fused with Western history and cultural fracture lines. He moves along its streets and pavements; through its department stores, museums and restaurants. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle-he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy.
Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way.
'Chaudhuri has already proved that he can write better than just about anybody of his generation.' Jonathan Coe
'A mysterious, subtle, haunting novel.'
Chris Power
An unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor.
Where most of us can barely trace our own footprints in the mass of moments that are the stuff of experience, numerous and storyless as grains of sand on a beach, Chaudhuri delves in masterfully to lift out arcs, moods, treasures.
The new novel about the present, the past, and the slippage between private and public life-from a writer who has 'like Proust, mastered the art of the moment.' (Hilary Mantel)