The Immortals

From the award-winning author of A New World, an incantatory new novel—at once plaintive and comic—about the powerful undercurrent of cultural and familial tradition in a society enthralled with the future.

1980s Bombay. Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained 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, and 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. And as the novel unfolds, we see how the two families come to challenge and change each other, 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.