Fasting, Feasting

Anita Desai's new book, hailed as "unsparing, yet tender and funny," brilliantly confirms her place among today's foremost Indian writers. Fasting, Feasting takes on Desai's greatest theme: the intricate, delicate web of family conflict. It tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family.