Calcutta

About the Book: Calcutta A masterpiece, one of the great books written about anunforgettable metropolis! In 1999, Amit Chaudhuri returned with his family to Calcutta.Hedid so tentatively. Calcutta was where his parents had movedafter retirement; it was the city he had loved in his youth and inwhoselanes he had spent tranquil childhood holidays; one he hadmade his name writing about. But that Calcutta had receded andanother had taken its place. Calcutta is Chaudhuris account of two years (2009-11) inthegreat metropolis. Using the idea of return and the historicalelections of 2011 as his fulcrum, he travels between the nineteenthcentury, when the city burst with a new vitality, tothetwenty-first century, when, utterly changed, it seems to be onthe verge of another turn. Along the way Chaudhuri evokes all that is most particular andextraordinary about the city-from its houses with their slattedwindows to its effervescent cultural life, its change of season andits Christmas and pujas. He paints, too, an acute, often ironic andoccasionally terribly funny picture of life in the city today-ofits malls and restaurants, its fitful attempts to embraceglobalisation, its middle class who leave and thenreturnreluctantly, its bygone aristocracy and its homeless and pooritinerants. About Author: Amit Chaudhuri Amit Chaudhuri is the author of five highly acclaimed novels,ofwhich A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, FreedomSongand A New World won, between them, the Commonwealth WritersPrize,the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los AngelesTimes Book Prize for Fiction and the Sahitya Akademi Award; hislatest novelis The Immortals. He is also a poet, an acclaimedmusician and a highly regarded critic and has edited The PicadorBook of Modern Indian Literature. He is a Fellow of the RoyalSociety ofLiterature and Professor of Contemporary Literature attheUniversity of East Anglia. In 2012 he was awarded the InfosysPrize for outstanding contribution to the humanities in l