More like this
Book review: Chowringhee
Novel of the week: A classic Indian book from 1962 is published for the first time in Britain
This 1962 classic of Calcutta life, now published for the first time in Britain, may well "supply more unashamed, reader-transporting enjoyment than any other fiction of the year", said Boyd Tonkin in the Independent.
"Hugely popular in West Bengal, Mani Sankar Mukherji (who publishes simply as Sankar) started out as a clerk to the last British barrister in Calcutta, but turned to writing after his employer's sudden death," said Peter Parker in the Sunday Times.
Written in Bengali and set in the 1950s, this novel is made up of a series of linked stories about the staff and guests of the "precariously respectable" Shahjahan hotel in central Calcutta; they are mostly comic, but sometimes "worthy of the best Bollywood melodrama".
Chowringhee is "a lovely, charming book brimming with life and full of the unexpectedness of a closely observed world", said Romesh Gunesekera in the Guardian. "Everything comes to the old hotel, either to the sumptuous guest rooms or to the terrace where the staff live. Love and death are never far away. Sankar writes of both simply and movingly."
Chowringhee by Sankar, 396pp (Atlantic, £15.99). The Week Bookshop £14.39 (inc p&p) ·
