Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained by his father in the classical idiom but happily engaged in teaching the more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets.

Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the romantically rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from Nirmalya's mother (Shyam's prize pupil), Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in both their lives.

As the novel unfolds, we see how their two families come to challenge and change each other, and how student and teacher slowly mesh their differing visions of the world, and what place music holds in it."

With exquisite sensuous detail, with quiet humor generosity, and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals gives us 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.

About the Author

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of several award-winning novels and is an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist. Freedom Song: Three Novels received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. 

Published: 2009
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780307270221
Publisher: Knopf Random House