Odysseus Abroad

'Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.' Guardian 1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatcher's Britain, homesick and isolated. His eccentric uncle, Radhesh, is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades. Over the course of one day, Odysseus Abroad follows the two isolated men on one of their weekly forays, gradually revealing the background to the two men's lives with deft precision and humour as they traverse London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.

Amit Chaudhuri is the acclaimed author of six novels, including Odysseus Abroad and A Strange and Sublime Address, and two books of essays. He has been awarded the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Award, the LA Times Book Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the English Association, and was a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. Currently he is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.