Best Selling Books by Anita Desai

Publisher Description

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

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.

Based on the life of the middle-class intellectuals in Calcutta, Voices in the City is an unforgettable story of a bohemian brother and his two sisters caught in the cross-currents of changing social values. In many ways the story reflects a vivid picture of India''s social transition — a phase in which the older elements are not altogether dead, and the emergent ones not fully evolved.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 BOOKER PRIZE Uma, the plain, spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions, unlike her ambitious younger sister Aruna, who brings off a ''good'' marriage, and brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir who is studying in America. Across the world in Massachusetts, life with the Patton family is bewildering for Arun in the alien culture of freedom, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence.

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.

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.

A young historian traveling to Mexico for the first time, Eric becomes involved in a curious quest to uncover the mysteries of his own family in an old mining town, where he becomes involved with the lives of characters past and present.

A collection of stories stretching from India to New England to Mexico from the author of Fasting, Feasting—an “undeniable genius” (TheWashington 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

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.

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.

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.

Hugo Baumgartner is a firangi wherever he goes—too dark for Hitler’s Germany, too fair for India. Escaping the Nazi regime but losing his parents to it, the wandering Jew builds a life in India only to be interrupted by war, and then partition—and finally finds a home in multitudinous Bombay. We meet him as a kindly, rather hapless old man who spends his days making the rounds of local teashops to scavenge for his many cats. Then, one day at the Café du Paris, one of his regular haunts, he encounters a surly young German of the new order—a drug-crazed hippie who will change his life forever. Set in Berlin, Venice, Calcutta—and of course Bombay—Baumgartner’s Bombay is the story of the twentieth century and a memorable portrait of Baumgartner, survivor, victim, everyman.

Distraught by her own lack of accomplishment -- especially in comparison to that of a childhood rival who has become a famous and successful publisher -- a middle-aged woman has the opportunity of a lifetime: to translate the work of an unknown literary star and, in the process, impress the woman she most admires.

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.

Disappointed by his professional and social position, an entitled and officious junior civil servant imagines that his life will change when a mysterious old man promises to lead him to a museum filled with priceless treasures.

Written in vivid narrative and chiselled prose, Bye-Bye Blackbird explores the lives of the outsiders seeking to forge a new identity in an alien society. Set against England''s green and grisly landscape, enigmatic and attractive to some, depressing and nauseating to others, it is a story of everyday heroism against subtle oppression, crumbling traditions and homesickness. ''Characters grow with life, the scenes are delicately painted and the nuances of changing mood skilfully transmitted.'' — Hindu ''More than a novel, it is a psychological study of the love-hate relationship the immigrants have towards their country of adoption.'' — Indian Express

The Complete Stories gathers together Anita Desai''s short story collections Diamond Dust and Games at Twilight and the novellas of The Artist of Disappearance, with a new preface from the author. From the icy suburbs of Canada to the overcrowded B&Bs of Cornwall, via the hill towns and cities of India, Anita Desai observes human behaviour unflinchingly but not unkindly, recognising our ordinariness and our strangeness, and capturing both with quiet precision.

Set in contemporary Bombay and other cities, these stories reflect the kaleidoscope of urban life - evoking the colour, sounds and white-hot heat of the city. Warm, perceptive, humorous and touched with sadness, Anita Desai’s stories are peopled with intensely individual characters - the man spiritually transformed by the surface texture of a melon; the American wife who, homesick for the verdant farmlands of Vermont, turns to the hippies in the Indian hills; the painter living in a slum who fills his canvasses with flowers, birds and landscapes he has never seen.

A rich, Chekhovian novel by one of the most gifted of contemporary Indianwriters - The New Yorkerthe youngest, Tara - now a mother of two - has returned from America to thescene of her unusual, lonesome childhood.Here, as always, is her sister Bim, doggedly single college lecturer andcaretaker of all. In her presence, Tara sinks into the blissful torpor of home, atonce her dreamy old self, but careful as ever around her older sister. For at theheart of this reunion are numerous tensions: their autistic brother Baba isincreasingly unquiet; Bim has not spoken to their other brother, Raja, for yearsand refuses to go to his daughter s wedding; Tara feels the persistent guilt ofhaving, like the others, abandoned her. Spanning the post-independence yearsfrom the 40s to the 80s, the sisters recall the death of Gandhi along with thoseof their parents, Raja s infatuation with their neighboring Muslim family andthe violence of Partition. For here is the tale of both modern India and onefamily s struggle against disintegration. Clear Light of Day is vintage AnitaDesai, a novel as wonderfully contemplative as a cup of afternoon tea.

Shailanal: Mathili Translation From English By Shreesh Chaudhari Of Anita Desai''S Akademi Award-Winning, Indian English Novel Fire On The Mountain.

Les Koels commencèrent à appeler avant le lever du jour. Leurs voix résonnaient comme un carillon dans les arbres sombres, s''appelant et se faisant écho, s''imitant et s''encourageant mutuellement à lancer des cris de plus en plus aigus. Tara ne supportant plus leurs clameurs plaintives se leva et sortit sur la véranda où elle fut aveuglée par la lumière éblouissante du soleil. Faisant une grimace elle abrita ses yeux et aperçut la silhouette blanche de sa sœur qui marchait à pas lents le long de la " promenade des roses " comme ils l''appelaient autrefois... A Delhi aujourd''hui, Tara, la quarantaine, qui a longtemps vécu à l''étranger avec son mari diplomate, revient séjourner dans la maison de son enfance. Bim, sa sœur aînée, et Baba, leur frère autiste, y vivent encore. Très vite les souvenirs, les querelles et les jeux d''autrefois, les jalousies et les regrets, tout revient à la surface. Bim prend la mesure de ce qu''elle ne connaîtra jamais, Tara de ce qu''elle croit avoir perdu... Dans la touffeur de l''été, les deux sœurs vont régler à fleuret moucheté de vieilles dettes, de très anciens comptes... Avec La claire lumière du jour, Anita Desai entreprend un très délicat, un dangereux travail sur le temps et, chez elle, comme chez Tourgueniev, grondent les orages dont on ne sait s''ils éclateront finalement.