Jayojit, a semi-successful writer, now divorced, has finally retrieved his son Bonny for his summer holidays. They are leaving their home in the American Midwest and going back to Calcutta, to his grandparents, the Admiral and his wife. A New World watches Jayojit and his son as they share the dark, close flat with his parents while the city outside is blanketed in fierce summer heat. Amit Chaudhuri delineates with breathtaking delicacy the details of married lives of an elderly couple entrenched in the unquestioning roles of their past and of a modern marriage now sharply severed in two.

`He has as much of life in each of his books as many of his contemporaries will capture in a career . . . reading some of these passages, you can be reminded of reading Joyces Dubliners for the first time, where every sentence can seem a small act of beauty Tim Adams, Observer