"An intensely personal novel about childhood, memory, and history by one of today's most celebrated authors, now available in the US for the first time. In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on his mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit's last remaining...

Meditations on city life in Mumbai, Calcutta, and the United Kingdom as well as elegies for the dead populate this original collection. Amit Chaudhuri, one of the most exploratory writers of English-language fiction, has also written and published poetry throughout his career as a novelist, poetry that shares many of the concerns of his prose while sounding a distinct and memorable note of its own. This book collects the greater portion of that work...