The 1991 Betty Trask Award winner. These nine stories feature an Indian boy who spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create a shifting background to the shaping of people's lives.
Every fiction must create an illusion of reality; and Chaudhuri s novels succeed in doing so to an impressive degree. He has such a tender intimacy with the world and the people who inhabit it
(New York Review of Books) --New York Review of Books
Chaudhuri s languorous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to put in any category at all
(Salman Rushdie) --Salman Rushdie
This evocation of the routine, quotidian magic of normality strikes me as an extraordinary thing to have brought off... mesmerizing
(John Lanchester
Vogue) --Vogue