SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 BOOKER PRIZE Uma, the plain, spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions, unlike her ambitious younger sister Aruna, who brings off a 'good' marriage, and brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir who is studying in America. Across the world in Massachusetts, life with the Patton family is bewildering for Arun in the alien culture of freedom, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence.
This book is the story of a young girl obsessed by a childhood prophecy of disaster. The author builds up an atmosphere of tension and oppression, in the middle of an Indian summer.
In this sensitive portrayal of human nature, Anita Desai, one of India’s foremost writers, paints an intimate portrait of lives impacted by the quest for identity and purpose. Deven, a Hindi lecturer in small-town Mirpore, lives a humdrum existence. A chance to interview Nur—India’s greatest living Urdu poet—offers him an escape from his dreary life. But the Nur he meets is an enfeebled man, surrounded by clashing wives and preying sycophants. Deven’s decision to be the custodian of Nur’s verse gives birth to an unusual alliance between the two. Stimulating and thought provoking, In Custody is a brilliant parable lamenting the gradual corrosion of culture and tradition in the face of modernity, and a dazzling study of the complexity of human relationships.
"The zigzag paths of these characters converge on the Day of the Dead, bringing together past and present in a moment of powerful epiphany."--BOOK JACKET.
As Eckhart Tolle has written, poetry "has been recognized since ancient times as a highly appropriate medium for the expression and transmission of spiritual truth." The Clear Light is Steve Taylor's latest contribution to this poetic tradition, offering short and powerful reflections as a guide to spiritual awakening and as experiential glimpses of the state of enlightenment itself. Taylor ranges widely, through subjects including "Making the Human Race Whole," "Freedom from the Past," and "The Reality of Connection," always in clear and simple language. Best of all, he reminds us of the choices we always have when life feels chaotic and overwhelming: empathy, acceptance, and love. Soothing but also challenging, Taylor's words continually affirm the profound bedrock of peace and even joy in the present that is always available. The book's eponymous reflection says it best: There is nothing that can't be undone no past injury that can't be healed no past mistake that can't be corrected in the clear light of the present. Reading this book is a transformational spiritual experience in itself.
Sophie and Matteo are young and in love, sharing a dissatisfaction with their bourgeois Italian upbringing. Naturally, like so many other young Westerners in the sixties and seventies, they go to India. But the realities of life in an ashram ignite their differences; Sophie wants to be a tourist and go to Goa and eat shrimp, which Matteo scorns, seeking the ‘real’ India. Pragmatic Sophie is disillusioned by the hardships they encounter, while her husband, who yearns for spiritual fulfillment, sees only the purity of ascetic life, leading him to Mother, a charismatic guru. Trying to reclaim an ailing Matteo, Sophie embarks on a new journey in search for a different truth; that of Mother’s mysterious past. Soon, she finds that the immortal has a history of her own; born in Cairo, she was once Laila, a dancer who toured the world before coming to Bombay to search for ‘divine love’. What each of the three people discover, on their individual quests, is at its heart that ancient truth: that wisdom is found in the journey itself. A stirring, profound exploration of emotional exile, of sacred and profane loves, Journey to Ithaca is a masterful novel.
