Editions

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus

  • ISBN: 9781784742539

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 222mm x 29mm x 144mm

  • Weight: 407g

  • RRP: £12.99

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

'I loved this beautiful book. It's tender and compassionate, written with exquisite care and verve, and so so SO funny' MARIAN KEYES

Professor Chandra is an expert at complex problems. There's just one he can't crack: the secret of happiness

In the moments after the bicycle accident, Professor Chandra doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes, but his life’s work.

He’s just narrowly missed out on the Nobel Prize (again) and even though he knows he should get straight back to his pie charts, his doctor has other ideas.

All this work. All this success. All this stress. It’s killing him. He needs to take a break, start enjoying himself. In short, says his doctor (who is from California), Professor Chandra should just follow his bliss.

He doesn’t know it yet, but Professor Chandra is about to embark on the trip of a lifetime.

  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus

  • ISBN: 9781784742539

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 222mm x 29mm x 144mm

  • Weight: 407g

  • RRP: £12.99

Reviews

  • "I loved this beautiful beautiful book. It's tender and compassionate, written with exquisite care and verve, and so so SO funny"

    Marian Keyes

  • "Chandra is a delightful creation: peevish, intolerant, intellectually exacting, unwittingly eccentric, nerdy, needy let lovable. The book, like its picaresque hero, is a one-off"

    Patricia Nicol, Sunday Times

  • "This brilliant and eloquent novel, which puts into words so many unutterable annoyances, is a sort of Zen satire in which tolerance and understanding mingle with hilarious criticism of contemporary mores. It’s a wonderful read"

    Wendy Holden, Daily Mail

  • "Rajeev Balasubramanyam gently pokes fun at the modern fondness for positivity, but tells a disarmingly positive story... The writing is elegant and witty and the comedy is always underpinned with humanity; a life without bliss is no life, and the gradual dawning of Chandra’s self-awareness is genuinely uplifting"

    Kate Saunders, The Times

  • "Balances satire and self-enlightenment... a surprisingly soulful family tale that echoes Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections in its witty exploration of three children trying to free themselves from the influence of their parents"

    Ben East, Observer

  • "Uplifting literature, or up-lit as it’s called by publishers, is dominating the bestseller charts... One of the funniest is Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasubramanyam... Beneath the comedy lie serious concerns. Wellness, capitalism, mollycoddled minds intolerant of political difference: Balasubramanyam’s issues are current"

    Francesca Angelini, Sunday Times

  • "By turns charming and witty, this is an effortless, uplifting read that has many pertinent observations to make about family relationships"

    Simon Humphreys, Mail on Sunday

  • "His journey provides a genuine look at what happiness is or might be, as well as being properly, heart warningly funny. A joyful take on grasping second chances"

    Alexandra Heminsley, Grazia

  • "After the brilliant, stressed, cynical economist Professor Chandra has a serious accident, he is told to take a break and 'follow his bliss' to California. Little does he know he'll discover a thing or two about happiness"

    Elle

  • "A gentle ride of a book that tackles all of life’s big questions and also manages to be very, very funny"

    Red

About the Author

Rajeev Balasubramanyam

Rajeev Balasubramanyam was born in Lancashire and studied at Oxford, Cambridge and Lancaster universities. He is the prize-winning author of In Beautiful Disguises. He has lived in London, Manchester, a remote Suffolk beach, Kathmandu and Hong Kong, where he was a Research Scholar in the Society of Scholars at Hong Kong University. He was a fellow of the Hemera Foundation, for writers with a meditation practice, and has been writer-in-residence at Crestone Zen Mountain Center and the Zen Center of New York City. His journalism and short fiction have appeared in the Washington Post, The Economist, the New Statesman, London Review of Books, Paris Review, McSweeney’s and many others. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

Rajeev Balasubramanyam

Read more

/content/dam/prh/articles/adults/2018/january/VINTAGE_article_promo_safe_area_RAJEEV.jpg

Features

A beginner’s guide to meditation and how it will help you lead a happier life: Rajeev Balasubramanyam

A past Fellow of the Hemera Foundation for writers with a meditation practice, and writer in residence at Brooklyn Zen Center, Rajeev Balasubramanyam is the author of the heart-warming story of a curmudgeonly middle-aged man's quest for happiness, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss. Here he offers a beginner's guide to meditation and explains how it could help us all live more blissfully.

Our Use of Cookies

We use cookies on this site to enable certain parts of the site to function and to collect information about your use of the site so that we can improve our visitors’ experience.

For more on our cookies and changing your settings click here

Strictly Necessary

Strictly Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions. See More.

Analytics

Analytics cookies help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages. See More.

Preferences & Features

Preference and Feature cookies allow our website to remember choices you make, such as your language preferences and any customisations you make to pages on our website during your visit. See More.

Targeting / Advertising

Targeting cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests. They perform functions like preventing the same content from reappearing, ensuring ads are displayed and, in some cases, selecting content based on your interests. See More.