Anita Chaudhuri enjoys a quiet book on 1980s student life that speaks volumes

Ananda is a lonely student, aspiring poet and transplanted Bengali living in a sketchy student flat with an assortment of other foreign students in the heart of London’s bedsitland.

At 9am sharp every morning, he practises singing Indian ragas as a form of revenge against the neighbours who wake him up with ill-judged pop music in the middle of the night.

As he slyly observes, it is the melody that wakes them; they would have slept soundly through Karma Chameleon.

Not a lot happens in this novel, which takes place over the course of one July day in 1985.

Ananda goes to visit his mysterious fiftysomething Uncle, at his bedsit in pre-gentrified Belsize Park, and they go for a walk before returning home for a curry.

It’s a world familiar to Chaudhuri who studied in London before attending Oxford University for a post-graduate study of DH Lawrence’s poetry.

It is said that novels set in the past always provide a commentary on the present day, and ultimately that is the source of power with Odysseus Abroad.

Chaudhuri’s unflinchingly accurate depiction of Margaret Thatcher’s London, viewed through Bengali eyes, is both funny and sad.

The novel is also a homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which itself was a homage to Homer’s Odyssey.

This is a quiet narrative that speaks volumes.

Odysseus Abroad
Amit Chaudhuri
Hardcover £12.99, One World (ebook £8.55)