Fasting, Feasting

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 BOOKER PRIZEUma, 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.

Desai has a wicked, subtle humour...and her characters are beautifully described... Her writing is polished and mature, with a wit she cleverly underplays, Anita Desai is one of Tolstoy's inheritors. Like his, her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive... Fasting, Feasting is a hypnotically readable story, in language which has the precision of poetry...an ambitious, successful and disturbing novel, A compelling, mature work by India's finest writer in English, A quiet, low-key novel, notable for its vignettes...[which] are so sharp, so rich in detail, that the book packs a real polemic punch...Fasting Feasting is a fine showcase for the delicate, distinctive skills of Anita Desai

Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of 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.