Anita Desai

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.

This Man Booker Prize finalist is a “splendid novel” about siblings and their very different lives in India and America (The Wall Street Journal).
 
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, who has made a “good” marriage and managed to escape. Meanwhile...

"Written late in Anita Desai's illustrious career, these three novellas ruminate on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life's expectations and dreams and its realities. Set in India in the not too distant past, the stories' diverse surroundings and dramas frame universal themes, which illuminate the ways in which various aspects of the Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai's characteristic...

Eric is a newly minted historian just out of graduate school, plagued by self-doubt over both his past choices and his future options. With no clear direction, he follows his lover, Em, when she travels to the Yucatan for her scientific research, but ends up alone in this foreign place. And so he pursues his own private quest, tracing his family's history to a Mexican ghost town, where, a hundred years earlier, young Cornish miners-among them Eric's...

Over the course of her glittering literary career, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote some of the most wonderful novels of the twentieth century and screenplays to some of the most beloved films - but she was also a master of the short story form. This stunning new collection brings together the jewels in the crown of her writing: it is a showcase of astonishing storytelling power.

Deven, a Hindi lecturer at Lala Ram Lal College, Mirpore, can't quite believe his luck when he is asked to interview Nur, India's greatest Urdu poet. But the ailing, debauched old man he discovers in the lanes behind Delhi's Jama Masjid bears no resemblance to the idol of his youth, surrounded by feuding wives and a herd of parasitic followers who drink his whisky and eat his food. Timid, self-effacing Deven is emboldened even as he is bullied, cheated,...

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...