Friend of My Youth

Product Description

An intensely personal novel about childhood, memory, and history by one of today’s most celebrated authors, now available in the US for the first time.

Friend of My Youth begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading. Ramu, the friend of his youth, with whom he likes to get together when he comes back, is not there: after years of disabling drug addiction, Ramu has signed up for an intensive rehab program. But Amit Chaudhuri has errands to run in Bombay for his mother and wife, which take him back to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the site, not that long before, of a brutal terrorist attack.

Amit Chaudhuri writes novels the way an extraordinary instrumentalist makes music, stating and restating his themes, trying them out in different keys and to various effect, developing and dropping them, only to pick them up again and turn them completely around. He engages both our minds and our hearts. He makes us marvel.
Friend of My Youth, his deceptively casual and continually observant and inventive new novel, makes us see and feel the great city of Bombay while bringing us into the quizzical, tender, rueful, and reflective sensibility of its central character, Amit Chaudhuri, not to be confused, we are told, with the novelist who wrote this book.
Friend of My Youth reflects on the nature of identity, the passage of time, the experience of friendship, the indignities of youth and middle age, the lives of parents and children, and, for all the humor that seasons its pages, terror, the terror that can strike from nowhere, the terror that is a fact of daily life.
Friend of My Youth is fearfully and wonderfully made.

Review

“Chaudhuri’s measured, subtle, light-footed fiction is rich with hanging vignettes of domestic and urban life.” —James Wood

“Amit Chaudhuri’s 
Friend of My Youth offers a thoughtfully meta exploration of the passage of time, the multiplicity of selves, and the way in which writing and place can connect the two.” —
Shelf Awareness

“With the publication of
Friend of My Youth, Amit Chaudhuri is now the author of seven novels, greatly admired, especially by his peers . . . the drama of the self, spun from Chaudhuri’s meditations and recollections, is artfully composed and utterly absorbing.” —Kate Webb,
The Times Literary Supplement

“In this elusive, evocative fiction, a novelist’s visit to his boyhood hometown of Bombay calls up memories of a longtime friend and a recent terrorist episode. . . . Anything but a conventional novel, its pleasures arise from a craftsman’s writing and its subtle demands and rewards.” —
Kirkus, starred review

“A mini masterpiece. A really beautiful book. I love his honest, unsparing descriptions of himself, his weird, off-beat, unapologetic persona.” —
Financial Times,
Everything Else podcast

“To paraphrase a title of Proust’s, a writer Chaudhuri has been compared to often, this is a remarkable record of pasts recaptured that had never been free in the first place.” —Michael Autrey,
Booklist

“In this cogent and introspective novel, Chaudhuri movingly portrays how other people can allow individuals to connect their present and past.” —
Publishers Weekly

“What [Chaudhuri] does in this short novel, with exquisite delicacy, is show disconnection, vacancy and the physical world’s imperviousness to human action, even of the most violent kind.” —
Esquire (UK) 

“
Friend of My Youth is a taut, efficient book: part novel and part manifesto. It presents itself as a work of fiction about friendship, the experiences of youth and the city of Mumbai, but really it’s a kind of anti-novel: a book about the failures of fiction to account for the realities of memory.” —
The Guardian
 
“Chaudhuri is an exceptionally subtle writer, a skeptical seeker rather than a postmodern show-off. However you classify it, this journey through the traces of his past earns its literary sleight-of-hand. . . . In a book that (in a good