Best Selling Books by Anita Desai

Award-winning novelist Anita Desai explores time and transformation in these three artful novellas

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: A "rich, Chekhovian novel" about family and forgiveness from the acclaimed author of Fire on the Mountain ( The New Yorker). At the heart of this "wonderful" novel are the moving relationships between the estranged members of the Das family ( The Washington Post Book World). Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women''s college who lives in her childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions resurface, blending into a domestic drama that leads to beautiful and profound moments of self-understanding. Set in the vividly portrayed environs of Old Delhi, " Clear Light of Day does what only the very best novels can do: it totally submerges us. It also takes us so deeply into another world that we almost fear we won''t be able to climb out again" ( The New York Times Book Review). "Passages must be read and reread so that you savor their imagery, their language, and their wisdom." — The Washington Post Book World "[A] thoroughly universal tale of unhealable family hurts . . . Distinctively shaded with enticing glimpses of India''s Hindu middle-class in shabby decline." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

In this sensitive portrayal of human nature, Anita Desai, one of India’s foremost writers, paints an intimate portrait of lives impacted by the quest for identity and purpose. Deven, a Hindi lecturer in small-town Mirpore, lives a humdrum existence. A chance to interview Nur—India’s greatest living Urdu poet—offers him an escape from his dreary life. But the Nur he meets is an enfeebled man, surrounded by clashing wives and preying sycophants. Deven’s decision to be the custodian of Nur’s verse gives birth to an unusual alliance between the two. Stimulating and thought provoking, In Custody is a brilliant parable lamenting the gradual corrosion of culture and tradition in the face of modernity, and a dazzling study of the complexity of human relationships.

Sophie and Matteo are young and in love, sharing a dissatisfaction with their bourgeois Italian upbringing. Naturally, like so many other young Westerners in the sixties and seventies, they go to India. But the realities of life in an ashram ignite their differences; Sophie wants to be a tourist and go to Goa and eat shrimp, which Matteo scorns, seeking the ‘real’ India. Pragmatic Sophie is disillusioned by the hardships they encounter, while her husband, who yearns for spiritual fulfillment, sees only the purity of ascetic life, leading him to Mother, a charismatic guru. Trying to reclaim an ailing Matteo, Sophie embarks on a new journey in search for a different truth; that of Mother’s mysterious past. Soon, she finds that the immortal has a history of her own; born in Cairo, she was once Laila, a dancer who toured the world before coming to Bombay to search for ‘divine love’. What each of the three people discover, on their individual quests, is at its heart that ancient truth: that wisdom is found in the journey itself. A stirring, profound exploration of emotional exile, of sacred and profane loves, Journey to Ithaca is a masterful novel.

From “world-class writer” (The Washington Post) and three-time Booker finalist Anita Desai, an exquisitely written stunning exploration of love, place, memory, history, and the secrets between a mother and her daughter. Away from her home in India to study Spanish, Bonita sits on a bench in El Jardin de San Miguel, Mexico, basking in the park’s lush beauty, when she slowly becomes aware that she is being watched. An elderly woman approaches her, claiming that she knew Bonita’s mother—that they had been friends when Bonita’s mother had lived in Mexico as a talented young artist. Bonita tells the stranger that she must be mistaken; her mother was not a painter and had never travelled to Mexico. Though the stranger leaves, Bonita cannot shake the feeling that she is being followed. Days later, haunted by the encounter, Bonita seeks out the woman, whom she calls The Trickster, and follows her on a tour of what may, or may not, have been her mother’s past. As a series of mysterious events brilliantly unfold, Bonita is unable to escape The Trickster’s presence, as she is forced to confront questions of truth and identity, and specters of familial and national violence. A masterpiece of storytelling from a gifted writer, Rosarita is a profound mediation on mothers and marriage, art and self-expression, and how the traumas from the past can impact future generations.

Gone are the days when Nanda Kaul watched over her family and played the part of Vice-Chancellor’s wife. Leaving her children behind in the real world, the busier world, she has chosen to spend her last years alone in the mountains in Kasauli, in a secluded bungalow called Carignano. Until one summer her great-granddaughter Raka is dispatched to Kasauli – and everything changes. Nanda is at first dismayed at this break in her preciously acquired solitude. Fiercely taciturn, Raka is, like her, quite untamed. The girl prefers the company of apricot trees and animals to her great-grandmother’s, and spends her afternoons rambling over the mountainside. But the two are more alike than they know. Throughout the hot, long summer, Nanda’s old, hidden dependencies and wounds come to the surface, ending, inevitably, in tragedy. Marvellous yet restrained, Fire on the Mountain speaks of the past and its unshakable hold over the present.

Plain, unmarriageable Uma has failed to outgrow her childhood home, with its bittersweet treats of puri-alu and barfi. Overprotected and starved for a life, she is smothered by her overbearing parents, successful sister Aruna, and Arun, the family’s disappointment of a son. Across the world in Massachusetts, where Arun has gone as a student, family life in an American suburb is bewilderingly different. The Pattons, who he lives with, appear strange and terrible. The women don’t appear to cook at all, though they stuff their shopping carts; the men barbecue huge chunks of meat; their daughter binges on innumerable candy bars. Increasingly, Mrs Patton is desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what Arun wants most is to be invisible. Moving from a traditional Indian household to an American one, Fasting, Feasting is a powerful exploration of hunger and plenty, and one of Anita Desai’s most socially acute novels.

This book is the story of a young girl obsessed by a childhood prophecy of disaster. The author builds up an atmosphere of tension and oppression, in the middle of an Indian summer.

"The zigzag paths of these characters converge on the Day of the Dead, bringing together past and present in a moment of powerful epiphany."--BOOK JACKET.

Buried resentments, unexpected disappointments, new friendships, small acts of cruelty, journeys that take you back to where you started. With trademark compassion and tender irony, Anita Desai’s short stories give us familiar worlds made unfamiliar, to wonderful effect. An ageing couple is stranded in a stultifying Delhi summer by the visit of a roguish old Oxford friend, who trades on his charm; an American woman turns to hippies living in the Indian hills, homesick for the farmlands of Vermont; a dog terrorizes the neighbourhood but is cherished by his stern master; a Delhi girl of slender means finds a new kind of freedom with her young friends, in her barsati home; a peaceful game of hide and seek turns into a nightmare; a businessman sees his own death. In one masterly volume, for the first time ever, here are Anita Desai’s collected stories —u00adu00adincluding Diamond Dust and Games at Twilight.

A collection of stories stretching from India to New England to Mexico from the author of Fasting, Feasting—an "undeniable genius" ( The Washington Post Book World). The men and women in these nine tales set out on journeys that suddenly go beyond the pale—or surprisingly lead them back to where they started. In the mischievous title story, a beloved dog brings nothing but disaster to his obsessed master; in other tales, old friendships and family ties stir up buried feelings, demanding either renewed commitment or escape. And in the final exquisite story, a young woman discovers a new kind of freedom in Delhi''s rooftop community. This is a richly diverse, "quiet but deeply satisfying" collection of stories, from a three-time Man Booker Prize finalist ( Kirkus Reviews). "Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture . . . Both serious and wonderfully entertaining." —Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Foreign Affairs "Served up with characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor and attention to the little hypocrisies of the middle class." — Publishers Weekly

Desai''s classic novel of the Holocaust era is the story of the profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. The book follows Hugo Baumgartner as he leaves behind Nazi Germany and his Jewish heritage for Calcutta, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien and then released to Bombay at war''s end.

A collection of 11 short stories that reflect Desai''s skill for evoking the full flavour of Indian life. The colours, smells and sounds, as well as some intensely individual characters, are here.