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Overview: Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of Rosarita. She has written 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.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
Clear Light of Day (1980)
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. 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" (New York Times Book Review).
In Custody (1984)
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.
Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988)
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.
Fasting, Feasting (1999)
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this warm, beautiful novel explores the intricate nets of family life in both India and America.
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 Zigzag Way (2004)
Eric is a buttoned down Boston boy, a misfit in his family of hearty fisher folk. Uncertain he will ever complete the book on immigration he has been funded to write, he impetuously decides to follow his bossy girlfriend to Mexico. There, he is seduced by the pageantry of this colourful new country and its old world charm, and stumbles on an astonishing discovery – his grandfather was one of the Cornish miners who worked the local mines more than a hundred years ago, and once had another wife. Soon, Eric will find himself abandoning his own tentative future project in search of his family’s other lives.
The Zigzag Way is the story of twentieth century Mexico, through civil unrest and personal calamity; of the exploitation of the Mexican Indians, and their dubious saviours, such as the formidable Doñavera, widow of a mining baron, and eric’s own grandmother, a young Cornish girl whose grave lies in a hillside cemetery. And in unravelling their dark, often violent, histories on the día de los Muertos, the day locals celebrate and remember their dead, Eric comes face to face with his own story, its past and present; even, the afterlife. Haunting and luminous, the zigzag way is a magical novel of strange, elegiac beauty.
The Museum of Final Journeys (2011)
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.
Rosarita (2024)
From three times Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai, Rosarita is a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, and a young woman’s determination to forge her own path.
A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss.
And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.
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