ISBN: 9788184000146    Publisher: Random House Year of publishing: 2007     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 250        Language: English

'A daring, colourful novel almost impossible to absorb in one reading.' TheNew York Times Book ReviewHugo Baumgartner is a firanghi wherever he goes - too dark for Hitler'sGermany, too fair for India. Escaping the Nazi regime but losing his parents toit, the wandering Jew builds a life in India only to be interrupted by war, andthen partition - and finally finds a home in multitudinous Bombay.We meet him as a kindly, rather hapless old man who spends his days makingthe rounds of local teashops to scavenge for his many cats. Then, one day atthe Cafe du Paris, one of his regular haunts, he encounters a surly youngGerman of the new order - a drug-crazed hippie who will change his lifeforever. Set in Berlin, Venice, Calcutta - and of course Bombay -Baumgartner's Bombay is the story of the twentieth century and a memorableportrait of Baumgartner, survivor, victim, everyman.
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Anita Desai is one of India's foremost write She has written sixteen works of fiction, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999), all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was made into a film by Merchant Ivory productions, starring Shashi Kapoor and Om Puri. Her most recent novel is The Zig Zag Way (2004). 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 also been a Professor of Writing at MIT and has frequently been honoured with awards among them 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 USA and Mexico.
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