Fasting, Feasting

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A classic from one of India?s greatest writers with a stunning new cover in watercolour Plain, unmarriageable Uma has failed to outgrow her childhood home, with its bittersweet treats of puri-alu and barfi. Overprotected and starved for a life, she is smothered by her overbearing parents, successful sister Aruna, and Arun, the family?s disappointment of a son. Across the world in Massachusetts, where Arun has gone as a student, family life in an American suburb is bewilderingly different. The Pattons, who he lives with, appear strange and terrible. The women don?t appear to cook at all, though they stuff their shopping carts; the men barbecue huge chunks of meat; their daughter binges on innumerable candy bars. Increasingly, Mrs Patton is desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what Arun wants most is to be invisible. Moving from a traditional Indian household to an American one, Fasting, Feasting is a powerful exploration of hunger and plenty, and one of Anita Desai?s most socially acute novels.

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Anita Desai is one of India?s foremost writers. She has written numerous works of fiction, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999)?all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize?as well as Baumgartner?s Bombay (1988) and The Zigzag Way (2004). In Custody was made into a film by Merchant-Ivory productions, starring Shashi Kapoor and Om Puri. Her most recent work is The Artist of Disappearance (2011). 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 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.