Fasting, Feasting

Anita Desai's new novel, a finalist for the Booker Prize, 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 the suburbs.

As Francine Prose wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Fasting, Feasting makes the apparently exotic destinies of Uma, Arun and their family seem as universal, as vital and familiar, as the food on our plates." From the overpowering warmth of Indian culture to the cool center of the American family, it captures the physical and emotional fasting and feasting that define two distinct cultures.