The Immortals - Tapa blanda

What a cast of humankind is conjured up... Chaudhuri is a master of social comedy, painting swift pen portraits even for minor characters... Ultimately, the final open-ended scene rests with the young man, fiction's most likeable malcontent, in his room in London, wrestling with questions he has no answers for' --Sunday Business Post

'The Immortals is an important novel... There is a filigreed, Jamesian quality to Chaudhuri's work, an urbanity and aesthetic style not often associated with Indian fiction... In Chaudhuri, we get an intense moral and psychological realism, a honed treatment of the fleeting specificities of everyday life' --Times Literary Supplement

'Chaudhuri's particular art lies in rendering beauty from normality.' --Financial Times

'Chaudhuri's exquisite, highly-nuanced, often very funny novel--after all, as unfamiliar to me as NJ is to Bombay--somehow took command of my thinking, my vocabulary, my sense of what's important and what should be. This kind of surrender is rare, and is what I always seek in fiction' --Richard Ford

'Comic, affectionate, regretful, but, under the veil of Chaudhuri's courteous, sympathising style, very drily aware... Delicate and judicious' --Glyn Maxwell, London Review of Books

A writer whose fiction is as beautiful as a classical ballet . . . a command performance. Even in the context of contemporary Indian writing in English, much of which is outstanding, Chaudhuri is the best... yet again he has shown that his fiction, which draws on themes of family and time, is as real as it is beautiful... Chaudhuri is a rare artist and an inspiring writer' --Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

'The lyrical quality of Chaudhuri's writing is striking. The imagery is vivid, the humour deliciously oblique... The great strength of the novel is the truthfulness of the emotional landscape... It invites honourable comparison with Thomas Mann' --The Times

'Chaudhuri's prose has a luminous, unforced elegance which is consistently engaging and wholly delightful . . . Its spheres of enquiry possess universal appeal which resonates beyond the confines of this accomplished and absorbing novel' --Spectator

Shyamji has music in his blood, for his father was the acclaimed 'heavenly singer' and guru, Ram Lal. But Shyam Lal is not his father, and knows he never will be. Mallika Sengupta's voice could have made her famous, but being the wife of a successful businessman is a full-time occupation in itself. Mallika's son, Nirmalya, believes in suffering for his art, and for him, all compromise is failure: those with talent should be true to that talent. No matter what. Written in haunting, melodic prose, The Immortals tells the story of Shyam, Mallika and Nirmalya: their relationships, their lives, their music. `As seductive as a delicate, half-heard tune' Daily Mail `A memorable work - capacious, multi-faceted and intimate, it is Indian to the core but universal in its implications' Independent `A beautiful novel of music and time, hopes and regrets' Irish Times