Near the end of Friend of My Youth, Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, the narrator, who is also named Amit Chaudhuri, reflects on a book he is writing, which may well be the book we are reading. “The book is a novel,” he thinks; “I’m pretty sure of that. What marks it out as a novel is this: the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name. The narrator’s views, thoughts, observations – essentially, the narrator’s life – are his or her own. The narrator might be created by the author, but is a mystery to him. The provenance of his or her remarks and actions is never plain.” It’s a moment of metafictional tricksiness which in less assured hands might feel arch, but Chaudhuri’s mastery is such that it strikes you as utterly plausible: simply the kind of thing a writer-narrator in a book by Amit Chaudhuri would have on his mind.

Chaudhuri has for a long time been ambivalent about the cultural capital the novel has claimed for itself. Addressing a symposium on literary activism in 2015, he spoke of how the form’s dominance seemed unlikely when, as a postgraduate student at Oxford, he began writing. It is “almost impossible now to remember”, he said, “that poetry was the literary genre to which the greatest prestige accrued until the mid-80s … that we didn’t think of success in writing mainly in relation to the market, and in relation to a particular genre, the novel”. Where once style seemed more important than form, and readers could argue all night about the weight and measure of a writer’s sentences, now the question of whether or not literature accurately reflects reality seems paramount. We have, so Chaudhuri has argued, been manipulated by the marketplace – aided and abetted by literary prizes and the complicity of academe – to think of the novel as the only game in town, to the detriment of other kinds of writing.

Friend of My Youth is a taut, efficient book: part novel and part manifesto. It presents itself as a work of fiction about friendship, the experiences of youth and the city of Mumbai, but really it’s a kind of anti-novel: a book about the failures of fiction to account for the realities of memory.

It opens with the narrator arriving in Mumbai for a book tour (one of the ways in which Chaudhuri hints at the politicisation of memory is that he refers to the city as Bombay throughout, despite its renaming by the right-wing Hindu nationalist party Shiv Sena in 1995). He’s travelling alone, and so messages friends, or people who were once friends, to invite them to a reading he is giving. Few respond.

Like Chaudhuri, the narrator was born in Mumbai but raised in Kolkata, and now feels ill at ease in the city of his birth. In a taxi from the airport the driver tests his knowledge of the territory. “I’d grown up here, but never belonged here,” he thinks. He now spends most of his time in England, and in the years since he left most of the people he had known as a boy have also left to study or work abroad – part of the postcolonial diaspora of middle-class Indian life.

Amit Chaudhuri: ‘I use the things that real memoirists throw out’ Read more

The only school friend with whom he’s stayed in touch is a man named Ramu, a charming but unreliable chancer who has for most of his life been addicted to heroin (“a chronic but doubtful user; he flirts with but doesn’t revel in danger; he’s timid”). Ramu’s addiction has prevented him from properly growing up, or leaving the city of his youth. Through the arrested development of hard drug use he embodies the narrator’s memories of his own childhood. But on his return to Mumbai he discovers that Ramu has been sent to rehab, and his friend’s absence from the city haunts the first half of the book. Also haunting him are thoughts of the 2008 terror attacks on the city, when 10 members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaida offshoot, carried out a series of bombings and shootings that left more than 160 dead.

Chaudhuri would probably disavow the term, but in part Friend of My Youth is a work of what is nowadays called “autofiction”, having something in common with Karl Ove Knausgaard, or Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, or Nell Zink’s wonderful The Wallcreeper. Like the narrator, Chaudhuri studied at UCL and Oxford. Like him, he is a talented musician, and wrote a novel set in Mumbai about music called The Immortals. But although many of the biographical details in Friend of My Youth align with Chaudhuri’s, they don’t add up to anything like biography. “I’m a novelist,” the narrator says to a journalist writing a profile on him, “but at some point I’ve been – as they might say these days in US Intelligence – ‘turned’. I pretend; bide my time. And, when I can, undermine the genre I work with – or for.”

• Friend of My Youth is published by Faber. To order a copy for £9.74 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.