Sojourn

Amit Chaudhuri

Nov 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Shawn K. Jain

About this audiobook

An Indian writer has come to Berlin as a visiting professor. This is his second sojourn in the city, which seems strange, and also strangely familiar, to him. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet living in exile, takes him up-then disappears. The visiting writer is increasingly adrift in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other, much as the new unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. To him, the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless commodities from all over the place and no prospect of any sort of historical transformation, appears to exist in a state of amnesiac suspense. He gets involved with a woman, Birgit. He begins to miss his classes. He blacks out in the street. People are worried. Amit Chaudhuri's Sojourn is a dramatic and disconcerting work of fiction, a book about the present as it slips into the past, a picture of a city and of a troubled mind, a historical novel about an ostensibly post-historical time, a story of haunting. Here, as in his earlier work, Chaudhuri pries open fictional form to explore questions of public and private life in ways that are both bold and subtle.

About the author

Amit Chaudhuri is the award-winning author of many novels, including, Friend of My Youth. Among his other published works are collections of short stories, poetry, and essays, as well as the nonfiction Calcutta and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence's poetry.

Shawn K. Jain, a Harvard University/Moscow Art Theater School/A.R.T. Institute graduate, has TV credits for shows on Apple TV+, CBS, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Showtime, and Peacock. He has narrated audiobooks for Penguin Random House, Hachette, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Epic!, Blackstone, GraphicAudio, and HQN.