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Desai creates unforgettable moments, both visual and emotional.’ Daily Telegraph 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 rogueish 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. For the first time ever, in one masterly volume, here are Anita Desai’s collected stories – from her very first story to her most recent one, published this year. ‘Exquisite… stories whose beauty is in the detail, and their knowledge of the human psyche. They sparkle, not with the brash glitter of rhinestones, but with the intenser, more complex fire of real diamonds.’
About The Author
Anita Desai is one of India’s foremost writers. She has authored sixteen works of fiction, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999) - all shortlisted for the Booker Prize – as well as Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Girton College and Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, and most recently the Sahitya Akademi in India, Anita Desai has been awarded The Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature and the Padma Shri. Born in Mussoorie to a German mother and a Bengali father, she was educated in Delhi and currently divides her time between the US and Mexico.
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