Odysseus Abroad

In the early 1980s, a young Indian boy – Ananda – comes to London to study English. He’s shy and sensitive; he wants to become a famous poet. In London, among his white-faced fellow British students, Ananda feels out of place. Terminally lonely, he reads, he wanders the streets, he tries to adjust to being an outsider. Also in London is Ananda’s uncle, a debonair, anorexic bachelor in his sixties whose childhood genius and potential has been dashed and deflated. Having been made redundant from his job, Rangamama lives in a bedsit in Hampstead, hording plastic bags from Bugdens, endlessly torturing himself with thoughts about a promotion he never received and obsessing about his bowel movements. A virgin, Rangamama is an eccentric loner – a foil to what the young Ananda fears he may become. Over the course of one day, the novel traces the movements of Ananda as he leaves his student lodgings and makes his way up to his uncle’s house and the diverse events that befall them. A brilliant exposition of loneliness, failure and the experience of living as a foreigner abroad in Thatcher’s Britain by one of our most internationally acclaimed writers, as well as a love letter to Ulysses, this is a strikingly original, deep and beautiful novel.