Desai, Anita :

Anita Desai was born in Mussorie, India, in 1937. Among her many published works in a career that spans three decades are CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY and IN CUSTODY, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches writing at MIT. She is married and has four children, including Kiran Desai, author of HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD.

"Beautifully written, richly textured . . . [a] haunting story."

-- Chaim Potok

Houghton Mifflin Trade and Reference Division Web Site, January, 2001

A "beautifully written, richly textured, and haunting story" (Chaim Potok), BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY is Anita Desai's classic novel of the Holocaust era, a story of profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. The novel follows Hugo Baumgartner as he flees Nazi Germany -- and his Jewish heritage -- for India, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien and then released to Bombay at war's end. In this tale of a man who, "like a figure in a Greek tragedy . . . seems to elude his destiny" (NEW LEADER), Desai's "capacious intelligence, her unsentimental compassion" (NEW REPUBLIC) reach their full height.