The Immortals

**Includes a new foreword by Pankaj Mishra** Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained in the classical idiom but happily teaching more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from her mother, Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences. With quiet humor and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals is a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

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.