Friend of My Youth

A writer called Amit Chaudhuri arrives in Bombay on a book-related visit, and finds himself in search of the city he grew up in. In a city shaken to its core not long ago by the 2008 terrorist strikes, his errant local friend, Ramu, a six-foot-tall Kannadiga and one-time junkie who cannot reconcile himself to modern-day adult life, is an unlikely protagonist, Bombay incarnate. The writer is his mirrored counterpart in an extraordinary narrative which is a reminder that, as the Guardian said, 'Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.'Friend of My Youth is a commentary on the power of memory and the stubborn interference of childhood in adult life; a paean to the transformative power of friendship by one of our greatest living writers.