Odysseus Abroad

A lyrical and modern exploration of loneliness and failure-as well as a love letter to Homer and James Joyce — by one of our most celebrated writers.

1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatcher's Britain, homesick and isolated. His eccentric uncle, Radhesh, is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades.

Over the course of one day, Odysseus Abroad follows the two isolated men on one of their weekly forays, gradually revealing the background to the two men's lives with deft precision and humour as they traverse London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.

'Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.' — Guardian

ISBN: 9780571360345 | Published: 10 January 2023 (first published 2014) | Paperback | 240 pages