Baumgartner's Bombay

'A daring and colourful novel. A superb observer of the human race' New York Times Book Review

A daring, colorful novel... Desai is a superb observer of the human race

One of the best English novelists writing in English

Hugo Baumgartner, the central character of Anita Desai's dazzling novel, is a wandering Jew all his life. From the agonising scenes of his childhood in pre-war Berlin, through his spell in business in Calcutta and then Bombay, he simply does not belong. Too dark for Hitler's society, he is too fair for India; he remains a firanghi, a foreigner, whatever he goes

Beautifully observed... Recovers a lost slice of history in its portrayal of a wounded survivor

Cleverly constructed, and full of sharp perceptions about human nature under the skin, whatever the colour

Anita Desai writes beautifully, employing an opulent vocabulary to great effect in her physical descriptions... The achievement of a superior writer

A book that puts to shame all the little epithets and pert cliches that praise may offer

Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.

Hugo Baumgartner is a man who doesn’t belong anywhere. He's a Berlin Jew who travelled to India to escape the Nazis and, after years spent the mercy of his past and his tumultuous adopted land, he has now retired to a seedy cat-filled apartment behind Bombay's Taj Hotel. But destiny has not finished with Baumgartner, in this haunting tale of the afflictions of exile.

Clear Light of Day

‘A rich Chekhovian novel by one of the most gifted of contemporary Indian writers’ New Yorker

**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** 
 
Discover the classic, Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel from one of India's finest ever writers. 
 
To the family living in the shabby, dusty house in Delhi, Tara's visit brings a sharp reminder of life outside tradition. For Bim, coping endlessly with their problems, there is a renewal of the old jealousies for, unlike her sister, she has failed to escape. 
 
Looking at both the cruelty and the beauty of family life and the harshness of India's modern history, Clear Light of Day brilliantly evokes the painful process of confronting and healing old wounds. 
 
'Clear Light of Day does what only the best novels can do; it totally submerges us.' Anne Tyler

A wonderful novel about silence and music, about the partition of a family as well as a nation

A rich Chekhovian novel by one of the most gifted of contemporary Indian writers

Anita Desai has created an entire little civilization here from a fistful of memories, from a patchwork of sickroom dreams and childhood games and fairy tales. 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

Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.

To the family living in the shabby, dusty house in Delhi, Tara's visit brings a sharp reminder of life outside tradition. For Bim, coping endlessly with their problems, there is a renewal of the old jealousies for, unlike her sister, she has failed to escape. Looking at both the cruelty and the beauty of family life and the harshness of India's modern history, Clear Light of Day brilliantly evokes the painful process of confronting and healing old wounds.

Fasting, Feasting

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this warm, beautiful novel explores the intricate nets of family life in both India and America.

Desai has a wicked, subtle humour...and her characters are beautifully described... Her writing is polished and mature, with a wit she cleverly underplays

Anita Desai is one of Tolstoy's inheritors. Like his, her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive... Fasting, Feasting is a hypnotically readable story, in language which has the precision of poetry...an ambitious, successful and disturbing novel

A compelling, mature work by India's finest writer in English

A quiet, low-key novel, notable for its vignettes...[which] are so sharp, so rich in detail, that the book packs a real polemic punch...Fasting Feasting is a fine showcase for the delicate, distinctive skills of Anita Desai

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.

The Complete Stories

The complete short fiction by the three-times Booker shortlisted author, gathered together in a single volume for the first time

Anita Desai is one of the greats of the modern short story ... The whole collection breathes old-style quality

To compare Anita Desai's fiction with that of Chekhov or the short stories of Tolstoy is not extravagant; it is entirely warranted

All her stories are full of a confidence in human nature that is a rarity and a pleasure to encounter

Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture

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&amp;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.

The Village by the Sea

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

Winner of the 1982 Guardian Award for children's fiction, The Village by the Sea is a survival story by the novelist Anita Desai. 
 
Set in a small fishing villlage near Bombay, Lila and Hari, aged 13 and 12, struggle to keep the family, including two young sisters, going when their mother is ill and their father usually the worse for drink. When Hari goes to Bombay to find work, Lila seems to be responsible for everything. Although the book paints a picture of extreme poverty, it demonstrates the strength of the family even in the most extreme circumstances and offers a powerful picture of another culture.

A story of survival set in a small fishing villlage near Bombay. Lila and Hari, aged 13 and 12, struggle to keep the family, including two young sisters, going when their mother is ill and their father usually the worse for drink. When Hari goes to Bombay to find work, Lila seems to be responsible for everything. Although the book paints a picture of extreme poverty, it demonstrates the strength of the family even in the most extreme circumstances and offers a powerful picture of another culture.

The Artist of Disappearance

A jewel of a book from India's finest living woman writer.

From a web of connections, Desai spins stories of history and loss that move the reader not with epiphanies, but through the sheer beauty of her storytelling

Her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive

She is one of the best English language novelists of modern times

A triptych of beautifully crafted novellas make up Anita Desai's exquisite new book. Set in modern India, but where history still casts a long shadow, the stories move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement. 
 
Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these stories remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer.

The Zigzag Way

'She is one of the best English language novelists of modern times' Daily Telegraph

Born and educated in India, she is the author of many novels and short stories, and has three times been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and though she lives in New York State, each year she spends time in India and Cambridge UK. In Custody was filmed by Merchant Ivory. She has travelled in Mexico, where she wrote part of this novel.

Eric is an uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload, but gradually seduced - by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in a 'ghost' mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. On the Día de los Muertos, the feast day when the locals celebrate and remember their dead, the various strands of the novel come together hauntingly, bringing together past and present in a moment of quiet, powerful epiphany.

Games At Twilight

'Beautifully accomplished and memorable' The Times

As finely written atmospheric pieces alone the stories would be memorable... As social documents they are absorbing. The volume's profound theme is the tension between convention and exploration, family solidarity and individualism... An admirable humane and responsible achievement

One of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture

Desai has a gift of opening up a closed world and making it clearly visible

Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her published works include many award-winning short story collections and novels, three of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, most recently Fasting, Feasting. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and lives in New York State.

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.

In Custody

‘A remarkable piece of work… A magnificent novel’ Salman Rushdie, Observer

A major attempt to tackle serious themes... extraordinarily rich in incident and detail.

Anita Desai's most subtle and mature work to date... She retains an unforced and powerful ease in conveying the colour and sounds and sensations of Indian life.

A wry, gently humorous novel, full of wisdom and restraint... The author chronicles India lovingly but it would be a mistake to think of her simply as an Indian writer, for her themes are universal

Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her published works include many award-winning short story collections and novels, three of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, most recently Fasting, Feasting. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and lives in New York State.

Touching and wonderfully funny, In Custody is woven around the yearnings and calamities of a small-town scholar in the north of India. An impoverished college lecturer, Deven, sees a way to escape from the meanness of his daily life when he is asked to interview India's greatest Urdu poet, Nur - a project that can only end in disaster.

Journey to Ithaca

'One of the best Indian novelists writing in English' - Independent

A beautiful book of epic scope... Anita Desai has surpassed her own previous high standards

She writes an extraordinarily delicate, lucid English... She is a writer's writer in that anyone who has ever set pen to paper must ask himself just what it is about the writing that makes it so memorable

Superbly powerful... A rich, evocative book

Like so many other young Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s, Matteo leaves home to search for spiritual enlightenment in the ashrams of India. He believes he finds it at the feet of 'the Mother', but down-to-earth Sophie, who accompanies him, does not find her inspiring so much as mysterious, and decides to trace the Mother's own story - from her travels with an Indian dance troupe in Paris, Venice and New York, to her search for divine love in India.

Diamond Dust & Other Stories

Exquisite...these stories sparkle with the fire of real diamonds.

Contemporary Indian fiction writers are among the finest in the world, and Desai at her best, as she is throughout this collection, has deservedly won her place alongside them.

Unsentimental, dazzling, funny and achingly sad.

All her stories are full of a confidence in human nature that is a rarity and a pleasure to encounter.

Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture.

Whole lives come into focus in this rich and diverse collection, as Desai trains her luminous spotlight on private universes from India to Canada and New England, from Cornwall to Mexico.  Her protagonists set out on journeys and find themselves suddenly beyond the pale, or surprisingly back where they started from.  Caught up in cycles of hope and disappointment, their lives are ruled by the seasons, or straitjacketed by the conventions of hospitality, friendship and family.  In the title story, a beloved dog, black as Satan, brings nothing but disaster; in another, a business man away from home sees his own death; and elsewhere, old relationships stir up buried resentments, issues demand commitment - or escape.  And in the final quiet masterpiece, one of Delhi's girls of slender means finds a kind of joy and freedom in a strange rooftop community.

Anita Desai

Vivid and alive, this powerful novella about one woman's belated rebellion against the powers that be is Anita Desai at her finest. 
 
Nanda Kaul retreats to a quiet house in the hills, determined to live out her days in solitude. But the arrival of her great-granddaughter disrupts the stillness she has carefully built, bringing with it memories she would rather leave behind. Fire on the Mountain is Anita Desai’s subtle, haunting novel of isolation and memory. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Anita Desai

Books by Anita Desai

Series by Anita Desai

Brief Encounters

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