Fasting, Feasting

Anita Desai’s intricate family drama examines the different ways in which two cultures assuage human hunger, desires and appetites. "Desai has a wicked, subtle humour...and her characters are beautifully described... Her writing is polished and mature, with a wit she cleverly underplays" (Daily Telegraph).

Uma, the older daughter of a close-knit Indian family, remains in the household of her childhood tending to her parents’ needs. Meanwhile, younger son Arun spends the summer in Massachusetts with the Patton family and their freezer full of meat that nobody seems to want to eat. Full of wit and sensuality, farce and deep pathos, Anita Desai’s novel cuts right to the heart of family life in two different cultures.

"Anita Desai is one of Tolstoy's inheritors. Like his, her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive... Fasting, Feasting is a hypnotically readable story, in language which has the precision of poetry...an ambitious, successful and disturbing novel."  - The Times

Anita Desai is the author of many novels & short stories and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She is the Emerita John E Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Royal Society of Literature.