Choudhury, Kushanava – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:00:02 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Choudhury, Kushanava – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 Epic City https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/epic-city/ Thu, 09 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/epic-city/ SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL WRITING PRIZE

‘Witty, polished, honest and insightful, The Epic City is likely to become for Calcutta what Suketu Mehta’s classic Maximum City is for Mumbai’ William Dalrymple, Observer

When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times.

After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to Calcutta, the city which his immigrant parents had abandoned. Taking a job at a newspaper, he found the streets of his childhood unchanged. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish sellers squatted on bazaar floors; and politics still meant barricades and bus burnings.

The Epic City is a soulful, compelling and often hilarious account of this metropolis of fifteen million people that is truly a world unto itself.

‘A beautifully observed and even more beautifully written new study of Calcutta’ Guardian

]]> The Epic City https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/the-epic-city/ Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/the-epic-city/ A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voiceEverything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta.When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India’s industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable portrait of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.

]]>