From the heart of a close-knit Indian household to the cool centre of an American family, this novel examines a surfeit of feasting and Indian family life, and the self-denial and starving of affluent American women in the land of plenty.
Awards
Shortlisted for Booker Prize for Fiction 1999.
Reviews
"In "Fasting, Feasting" -- the most recent in a series of outstanding fictions -- she returns to a world which is already disappearing and a milieu of which she remains the peerless chronicler... This is a compelling, mature work by India's finest writer in English." -- "Independent" "A fine showcase for the delicate, distinctive skills of Anita Desai." -- "Sunday Telegraph" "Desai has a wicked, subtle humour... and her characters are beautifully described." -- "Daily Telegraph" "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"
