Indiaclub.com Description

AMBER DUSK smells of Calcutta streets and resonates with the seductive tunes of Parisian nights. Robot oracles, the enigmatic photographer Valence Jourdain, a shadowy Blue Princess, Indian tribesmen and the mystical Lake Malaren colour this fascinating narrative, creating an edgy reality. The novel presents a rich tapestry of ideas weaving together Calcutta and Paris and the lives and passions of the unforgettable individuals that walk their streets. Here is a delicately crafted story about love, loathing and beatitude and the quest for peace in a time of intolerance.

REVIEWS:

Rajat Chaudhuri's Amber Dusk is a multi-leveled exploration of Love and other forms of Death where reality mixes and mingles with hyper¬, super¬, virtual¬ and surrealities to leave the reader breathless. A global cast of identifiable yet strange and sublime characters ¬ common saints, santhals, socialites and terrorists, pimps, prostitutes and gays, projectors and dreamers, actors, artists and astrologers, animated robots, talking birds and toys, prophets, revolutionaries, utopians, millenarians all flit across the dreamscapes of the protagonist Rishi's several lives and multiple forays into alternate worlds and times as the reader is taken on a vertiginous roller-coaster ride across cultures and continents. Calcutta is at the heart of this Quest Novel cum Bildungsroman cum psychedelic collage of Myth and Memory as Rishi ¬ the central character ¬ hunts for life's meaning with his lovers and antagonists that takes him finally to Stockholm's Lake Malaren (equi-significant to our own Manassarovar) and back to Kolkata following epiphanies and illuminations that take us through the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The title itself reveals the sensuous apperceptions and the inventive imagination of the author who creates images of Beauty and its evanescence almost on every page of this novel.

Amber Dusk resonates with echoes from at least a triple pun ¬ dusk falling around `Amber', a famed restaurant in the heart of Kolkata; golden sunsets fading and slipping into dusky twilight; and ``the cow-dust hour'' or ``godhuli lagna'' the most propitious time for marriage and romance when the Radhas and Krishnas of the world must set out on their glorious quests amidst the gathering gloom.


A big, ambitious first novel on the Liebestod theme mapping out multiple existentialist journeys and border-crossings that should create both ripples and waves among its international readership. A memorable novel of East-West encounter.’
— Amitava Roy, Shakespeare Professor of English and Drama,
Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata

`Our is a world where borders are vanishing yet newer ones are being created and strengthened. Everything here seems to be so close yet too far. The distance between cultures, political differences, inequity and personal distances stare us in the face. In the world of technology, there is no space for the comprehension of differences. Chaudhuri's novel draws it all together and in that sense besides being true to its time, is a human and sensitive account.’
— Marisa Emmer, Geographer and Professor of Geopolitics and
Regional and Urban Development, State University of Middle-
west (UNICENTRO), Brazil

`With an enthralling style, Chaudhuri tells a fascinating story about human encounters, changing fortunes and the search for purpose...a novel that lingers in your mind'
— Linda Essner, Journalist, Stockholm