ISBN: 9788184000771    Publisher: Random House Year of publishing: 2009     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 400        Language: English

Sophie and Matteo are young and in love, and share a dissatisfaction with theirbourgeois Italian upbringing. Naturally, like so many other young Westerners in the sixties andseventies, they come to India. But the realities of life in an ashram ignite their differences; Sophiewants to be a tourist and go to Goa and eat shrimp, which Matteo scorns, seeking the 'real' India.Pragmatic Sophie is disillusioned by the hardships they encounter, while her husband, who yearnsfor spiritual fulfillment, sees only the purity of ascetic life, leading him to Mother, a charismaticguru.Trying to reclaim an ailing Matteo, Sophie embarks on a new journey in search of a different truth; thatof Mother's mysterious past. Soon, she finds that the immortal has a history of her own; born in Cairo,she was once Laila, a dancer who toured the world before coming to Bombay to search for 'divinelove'. What each of the three people discover, on their individual quests, is at its heart, that ancienttruth: that wisdom is found in the journey itself.A stirring exploration of emotional exile, of sacred and profane love, Journey to Ithaca is amasterful novel.
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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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