Faber acquires 'haunting' novel from award-winning Amit Chaudhuri

Faber & Faber has acquired Friend of My Youth, a new novel by award-winning writer and critic Amit Chaudhuri.

Publisher Mitzi Angel acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency.

The seventh novel by Chaudhuri features a man named Amit Chaudhuri who returns to latter-day Bombay, the city of his childhood. As he navigates the city’s familiar topography and newer developments—using the 2008 terrorist attacks as a narrative pivot—he ruminates on the effect of geographical, historical and personal change.

Chaudhuri is the "acclaimed" author of six previous novels, including Odysseus Abroad (Oneworld) and A Strange and Sublime Address (Penguin), and two books of essays. He has been awarded the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Betty Trask award, the LA Times Book Prize and the SahityaAkademi Award, among other accolades. He was a judge of the Man Booker International Prize.

Angel said: “Friend of My Youth is a haunting, troubling book about a changing city and one man’s memories of that city. It is at once breathtakingly simple and endlessly nourishing. As Hilary Mantel has said of Amit Chaudhuri, ‘[he] is a miniaturist, for whom the complexities of the fleeting mood uncurl onto the page like a leaf, a petal'."

Chaudhuri said: "I’m really happy to have moved at this particular point in my writing life to Faber and Mitzi Angel. More than ever, it seems important to me that writers feel free to explore form and language on their own terms, and it’s heartening how Mitzi and today’s Faber concur about the importance of this sort of imaginative freedom."

Friend of My Youth will be published in August 2017.