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 author of seven novels, including Sojourn and Friend of My Youth, as well as three books of essays, two books of poems, and a collection of short stories. He has been awarded the James Tait Black Prize, the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Betty Trask award, the Encore Prize, the LA Times Book Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award. 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.



From the award-winning author of Sojourn, a mesmerising novel about the powerful undercurrent of cultural and familial tradition in a society enthralled with the future.