During the school holidays, Sandeep exchanges the smooth silence of his parents' modern flat in Bombay for a world of enchantment in his uncle's colourful household in Calcutta. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions and family visits are the background to more dramatic events.
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