"It is 1985. Twenty-two-year-old Ananda has been in London for two years, practicing at being a poet. He's homesick, thinks of himself as an inveterate outsider, and yet he can't help feeling that there's something romantic, even poetic, in his isolation. His uncle Radhesh, a magnificent failure who lives in genteel impoverishment and celibacy, has been in London for nearly three decades. [The novel] follows them on one of their weekly, familiar forays...