ISBN: 9788184000566    Publisher: Random House Year of publishing: 2007     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 344        Language: English

'Desai creates unforgettable moments, both visual and emotional.' DailyTelegraphBuried resentments, unexpected disappointments, new friendships, small acts of cruelty,journeys that take you back to where you started. With trademark compassion and tenderirony, Anita Desai's short stories give us familiar worlds made unfamiliar, to wonderfuleffect. An ageing couple is stranded in a stultifying Delhi summer by the visit of arogueish old Oxford friend, who trades on his charm; an American woman turns to hippiesliving in the Indian hills, homesick for the farmlands of Vermont; a dog terrorizes theneighbourhood but is cherished by his stern master; a Delhi girl of slender means fi nds anew kind of freedom with her young friends, in her barsati home; a peaceful game of hideand seek turns into a nightmare; a businessman sees his own death.

For the fi rst time ever,in one masterly volume, here are Anita Desai's collected stories - from her very fi rst storyto her most recent one, published this year.'Exquisite... stories whose beauty is in the detail, and their knowledge of the humanpsyche. They sparkle, not with the brash glitter of rhinestones, but with the intenser, morecomplex fi re of real diamonds.' The Times
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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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