ABOUT THE BOOK

Full of wit and sensuality, farce and deep pathos, Anita Desai's dazzling new novel cuts right to the heart of family life in two different cultures. Uma, the plain older daughter, fails to outgrow her home and family, and stays on, surrounded and smothered by godlike, over-bearing parents, her ambitious, successful sister Aruna, who brings off a 'good' marriage, Arun the disappointing son and heir - and the extended family of strange aunts and cousins like the feckless Ramu and the tragic, beautiful Anamika.

Across the world in Massachusetts, where young Arun goes as a student, life in the suburbs - where the Patton family men char hunks of meat while their womenfolk don't appear to cook or eat at all - is bewildering and full of terror for the young Indian adolescent far from home.

Two different ways of assuaging human hungers, desires and appetites are revealed in this subtle, sharp and poignant story, which moves from the hub of a close-knit Indian household, with its traditional obligations and impositions, its overpowering warmth and sensual response, to the cool centre of an American family, with its freedoms, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence. In both there are victims - and survivors.

Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her published works include several novels, children's books and short stories. 'Clear Light of Day' and 'In Custody' were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. She teaches in the Writing Program at MIT, and divides her time between India, Massachusetts, and Cambridge. 'In Custody' was filmed by Merchant Ivory Productions.