Afternoon Raag

Winner of the UK’s Encore Award for best second novel, a lyrical story of a Bengali student at Oxford University who is caught in the complications of a love triangle.

Afternoon Raag is a book of branching and overlapping stories, a book that like memory moves unpredictably in time. In it, a nameless first-person narrator looks back at his student days in Oxford, a period of loneliness and discovery when his affections were torn between two women, and to the summer vacations that took him from England to Bombay, where his parents lived, and later to Calcutta, where he was born.

Descriptions of Oxford’s green lawns and drab dorms, of friends and classes and the relentless drizzle, sit beside Bombay street scenes and recollections of the teacher, now dead, from whom the narrator and his mother learned music.

Afternoon Raag is a book about the uncertainty of youth and the strange inevitability of growing up. Its images are wonderfully vivid; its rhythms elastic and entrancing. Throughout it is haunted by the spirit of the music teacher, the master singer who gives shape to the elusive and annihilating passage of time.

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of more than a dozen books, several of which are available from NYRB, including the novels Friend of My Youth, Sojourn, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, and Freedom Song; a work of memoir and music criticism, Finding the Raga; and the poetry collection Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2023. Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. The author of several books of essays and two novels, he is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University.