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.

Clear Light of Day

Literature & Fiction

ANITA DESAI

British & Irish

Harpercollins

CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY

Genre Fiction

VINTAGE (RAND)

Owner's inscription, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Diamond Dust And Other Stories

Contemporary

Vintage

Journey to Ithaca

Journey To Ithaca

Fire on the Mountain

Nanda Kaul is old. She has chosen to spend her last years high up in the mountains where she can arrange her thoughts into tranquility. But her solitude is broken when her fragile and secretive great-grand-daughter, Raka, comes to stay. It is an intrusion Nanda Kaul deeply resents, but this child has a capacity to change things. Through the long hot summer months hidden dependencies and old wounds are uncovered, until tragedy seems as inevitable as a forest fire on the hillsides surrounding the villa.

Fire On The Mountain

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.

In Custody

An outsider in India, where he has fled from Nazi Germany, Hugo Baumgartner finds his painful past dredged up when he offers to help a wild young German hippie

Baumgartner's Bombay

Literary

Games At Twilight

A triptych of beautifully crafted novellas makes 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. In "The Museum of Final Journeys" an unnamed government official is called upon to inspect a faded mansion of forgotten treasures, each sent home by the absent, itinerant master. As he is taken through the estate, wondering whether to save these precious relics, he reaches the final - greatest - gift of all, looming out of the shadows. In "Translator, Translated", middle-aged Prema meets her successful publisher friend Tara at a school reunion. Tara hires her as a translator, but Prema, buoyed by her work and the sense of purpose it brings, begins deliberately to blur the line between writer and translator, and in so doing risks unravelling her desires and achievements. The final story is of Ravi, living hermit-like in the burnt-out shell of his family home high up in the Himalayan mountains. He cultivates not only silence and solitude but a secret hidden away in the woods, concealed from sight. When a film crew from Delhi intrudes upon his seclusion, it compels him to withdraw even further until he magically and elusively disappears...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 Artist of Disappearance

A beautiful story set in a fishing village near Bombay. on the life of children and familiary, useful for courses and an understanding of change and tradition in modern India

The Village By the Sea ( an Indian Family story)

King Penguin

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Books by ANITA DESAI